


Ripples

by Haecceitic



Series: Echoes [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: 1980s, Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Antennae, Childhood Trauma, Clairvoyance, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dreams and Nightmares, Dungeons & Dragons References, Electricity, Existential Crisis, Explosions, F/F, F/M, Flashbacks, Foreshadowing, Friendship, Internal Monologue, Lies, Loss of Parent(s), M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Music, Mystery, Nerdiness, POV Third Person Limited, Period Typical Attitudes, Personal Growth, Physics, Plot Twists, Pop Culture, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Promises, Realistic, Science Experiments, Season/Series 02, Self-Esteem Issues, Small Towns, Story within a Story, Survivor Guilt, Synesthesia, Teenage Dorks, Telekinesis, Telepathic Bond, Telepathy, Timeline Shenanigans, Unfortunate Implications, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Video & Computer Games
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2020-01-15 14:06:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18500536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haecceitic/pseuds/Haecceitic
Summary: An exploration of the unintended consequences of the use of power. The timeline is a pond, and ripples can't be stopped as easily as a nosebleed.ORThe kids from Hawkins are on the cusp of adulthood when the echoes of the past catch up with them. Facing threats both old and new, can the Party take control of their shared destiny before it's too late?





	1. Prologue

She hates the tests.

She hates the lab. She hates the equipment, the lights, the cold tiles. She always has.

She hates the feel of electrodes against her skin.

She hates the feeling that she's being measured. Like she's being reduced to equations… math… numbers.

She hates how the testing makes it even more obvious that she's different, abnormal. That she's a freak. That her abilities make her mysterious, uncanny, frightening.

She hasn't felt that way in a long time. What she has felt, instead, is the amazing warmth of being surrounded by family and friends. Hopper, Joyce, the Party. That sustaining warmth has a name. The people she cares about are called Home. It's overwhelming sometimes, when she thinks about how lucky she is, how much she is loved. They saved her. They have healed her.

But they can't erase the memories, not entirely.

Only one thing could have brought her back to this place.

She hates how the new, targeted testing forces her to use her powers in uncomfortable ways. It's like she's flexing muscles inside her head that she didn't know she had. Two weeks ago, the objective was a dumbbell. She had to levitate a series of dumbbells, to see how much weight she could keep suspended, and for how long.

Last week, she was spinning the dumbbells, twisting them in certain ways with her powers. "Radial Impulse, X-Y-Z Axis Isolation," the lab paperwork said.

She's starting to hate the dumbbells.

She hates being strapped into the gimbal chair, her head immobilized. Trapped. She was told why, something about measuring reaction forces, but she still hates it.

She hates the blindfold that is sometimes placed over her eyes, hiding the objective from her sight. It's called a control, but if anything, wearing the blindfold makes her lose control, her power flailing blindly around the room. She is so utterly drained after those sessions, after trying to Look without looking, that she can barely walk.

But most of all, she hates the reminders. The sights, the sounds, and especially the smells. The smell of metal, ozone, sweat and chlorine. They trigger vivid memories, from before. Often, they petrify her with flashbacks, visions she just has to ride out, sweating, trying not to scream. The visions are infinitely more vivid than the watery reflections of distant events that she can conjure in her mind. They are the nightmares of a resident test subject. A government asset. A dangerous weapon. A demon child. Guarded. Punished. A prisoner.

Terrified.

Only one thing makes her willing to relive that time.

She hates all the ways it's the same as before. But, in some ways… it's completely different. She's not a traumatized little girl anymore. She's a young woman with some education. She understands what's going on, for the most part. And she's not a prisoner. Not this time. There are no orderlies in white, no guards with guns to enforce her cooperation. There's no isolation cell.

She's free to leave. She can walk out the door anytime she wants. It's not even locked.

Only one thing keeps her here.

A promise.

He extracted the promise with the threat of danger. Not danger to her, but to others. To everyone. She was free to refuse… and also, she had no choice at all. If she did nothing, people would die.

She promised him that she would do this. And she intends to keep that promise, no matter how long it takes. No matter how much she hates every second. No matter how many flashbacks she has to endure.

She will keep at it, until the work is finished. Until the limits of her power are fully explored. Until the threat is contained.

Until he's found all the answers he seeks.

"How do you feel? Ready to try again?" He's beside the chair, checking her straps. His white lab coat, immaculate as always, gleams under the fluorescent lights. His voice is dry, absent. She's known him since she was little. She can tell that his mind is far away, weighing the next hypothesis. Calculating.

"Yes. I guess so." She sighs, her ribcage straining against the harness. 

"Good. We're getting some excellent results." He makes a note on his clipboard. He's not looking at her. "The recorder is still running. Whenever you're ready."

She glances at the objective, steels herself. She hates this. But she promised.

And she loves him.

"Okay… Mike," whispers Eleven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bear with me. I've got something in mind.


	2. What Lies Beneath

It was all because Jim had to make sure.

The old version of Hawkins Police Chief Jim Hopper would have been more than happy to let sleeping dogs lie. Hell, he had been a sleeping dog himself, kind of. The kind you couldn't teach. Old Jim hadn't been the most introspective sort of guy. The soul-searching stuff was for other people.

Well, he was definitely reflecting now, as he suited up for a night of urban spelunking.

Since December of '83, when he had taken in the telekinetic girl Eleven, officially adopting her a year later, Jim had changed. He would stare down anyone who suggested it, but he was a different man. A family man. 

He had raised her. Nobody else had been in her corner, so he took on the job. Broken as he was. She was a fearless, confident young woman now, who knew exactly who she was. He was so proud of her. She had found a way to thrive, partly because of, and partly in spite of, his best efforts.

And she had changed him along the way. He didn't have to work to protect her from harm -- from the world -- every second of every day. Not anymore. But he still did it, in small ways, from behind the scenes. Because that's what you do. He was that guy.

Oh, he was still the same asshole whose public repertoire consisted of growls, scowls and curses. And he would never be a by-the-book type of cop. But he wasn't phoning it in anymore. Sometimes, he actually remembered to do his paperwork. Okay, well, he remembered to cajole someone else into doing it, but the point was, he was taking things more seriously.

He had a reason to, now.

As a result, he had developed a profound mistrust of loose ends.

Loose ends... Like the former Hawkins National Laboratory. Where his daughter had been caged and abused, a weapon against the Soviets.

If Jim had had his way, the damn place would have been razed to its foundations back in '84, and the cavern in the sub-basement filled with gravel. He had even nudged old man Sattler about slipping in a quote for crushed stone ahead of the call for tenders.

But that had been wishful thinking, and Jim knew it. The property was, quite literally, off-limits. The lab, and its fenced-in wooded lot, was technically outside of Hawkins proper. The city limits ran right along the north side of that chain link fence.

The other side of the line was unincorporated territory of Roane County. And the county wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot writ. The county commissioners would only consider issuing a demolition permit if the place burned to the ground, and even then it was a toss-up. Bureaucrats.

Arson was out of the question. Okay, fine, he had considered it. But setting a fire, well, that was a crime. Jim chuckled grimly. Better call the cops! But more importantly, a fire would draw a lot of attention from media, local governments, utilities, insurance companies… and whoever had been left holding the deed after the shutdown. He really, really wanted to avoid such scrutiny.

Speaking of the shutdown, there was also the small matter of the site having been a black-budget research facility, nominally run by the federal Department of Energy, but almost certainly a CIA or NSA operation from the start. And if Jim had learned anything in the Army, it was that you did a crisp about-face when three-letter agencies were mentioned. You emphatically did not want to know. He had taken a chance, had stuck his neck out and gotten to know Sam Owens, whose own affiliation was ambiguous. And it had paid off, in the form of a legit birth certificate for El that, while technically a lie, was the truth in every way that mattered. But Owens had been the exception that proved the rule, as far as Jim was concerned. You don't mess with spooks.

In any case, that also appeared to be the default policy of Roane County, when the topic of the lab came up.

At the next-higher level, the Indiana State Police had already been burned by the lab in a public relations nightmare involving a "body" and a quarry. They were decidedly not interested in a repeat performance.

Officially, Jim's jurisdiction and authority ended the second he rolled up to that gate. Except... that word "officially" kind of depended on somebody watching. A soldier at the gatehouse, closed circuit security, government watchdogs, somebody.

In short, since the shutdown the issue of jurisdiction had become a bit more… theoretical. More a question of what you could get away with. And the lab was practically in Jim's backyard. Tucked away in the woods, away from prying eyes.

That reminded him. Where the hell was that pry bar?

Anyway, as far as Jim knew, there had been no change of ownership to the property, and no attempt to repair any of the damage the building had suffered in November of '84. It had been boarded up but left as-is, apparently forgotten for the past three years.

But he had become allergic to words like "apparently." And there was at least one man, whereabouts unknown, who would never forget about the lab. Jim would have bet his life on that.

And if that man ever showed his face around Jim's neck of the woods, Jim wanted to know about it. So that he could load some hollow point and take off the safety. Because Jim would never forget HNL's original director Dr Martin Brenner, either.

He had to be sure.

Which meant it became a tactical matter.

He knew how these things worked. If anyone came around to check the property, they would just make sure there were no signs of forced entry, and leave it at that. There wouldn't be a reason to go inside the condemned building. If the chain and padlock at the main entrance were intact, then all was well.

So, Jim had cut off the padlock and replaced it with one of his own. If his key ever stopped working, he would know that someone else with bolt cutters had had a reason to go inside.

Paranoia, the old Jim would have said. Of course nobody was inside that ruined place. It was a damn graveyard!

The old Jim was told to keep his opinion to himself.

He had checked the property every couple of months. He had never seen another soul. There had been zero activity since February of '85. The padlock was starting to rust.

So much for people in the building. But what about automated systems?

Well, machinery needed power. So, Jim had called in a favour from a guy he knew at Hawkins Power and Light. The actual utility, not the covert operation the lab's CIA spooks had run. Silenced automatic pistols weren't part of the toolkit for HPL's real service guys.

Turned out the lab had two redundant sources of AC power. One was an overhead line running through the woods from Hawkins, the other was underground conduit running up from the county road further south. The guy at HPL swore the first one was shut off, disconnected at a relay well inside Hawkins city limits.

The second line… Jim's friend couldn't be sure. But the account with Roane County Water and Electric didn't seem to be closed.

Well, shit. Jim had concluded, months ago, he was going to have to go in and see for himself. Just to be sure. Loose ends.

But recently… the dreams had made it urgent.

El's increasingly vivid nightmares worried him. She would wake up gasping, wrenched with sobs. She would sometimes whisper names into his chest when he comforted her. Brenner, the Demogorgon, the Mind Flayer. And something about ripples. It varied.

But always, again and again, the lab. She never wanted to talk about it the next morning, how she was reliving the most traumatic episodes of her childhood. But Jim knew something wasn't right. The dreams were getting worse. She was exhausted, getting less and less sleep. It was coming to a head. He could feel it. Why now, at seventeen? And sure, maybe it was nothing, but this was El. She just knew things, sometimes.

His El. He had to be sure. Now.

Which was why, an hour after sunset, he found himself struggling to cinch a climbing harness over his black tactical --

"Going to a costume party, Chief?"

Great. He had forgotten the rookie was in the building. "No."

"Because you look like a ninja or something."

"Going birdwatching," Jim growled.

"At night?"

"Batwatching," he amended. "You need something, Harrington?"

Steve snapped his fingers, grinning like an idiot. "Batman! That's who you look like. But you're missing the cape."

"Harrington…"

"It's a hell of a long way down to Wyandotte Cave, though. It's past Naptown."

"What?"

"You know, cave bats. I went down there once, years ago. Millions of them! Never again. I mean, the bats were okay, but I'm not much of a fan of tunnels anymore, not since --"

"Harrington! Go answer the phone. That's an order," Jim barked.

"Phone's not ringing, Chief." Harrington was suddenly shrewd, which made him look ridiculous. "You're breaking into the old lab, aren't you?"

Just great. Perfect. Jim rubbed his forehead. Well, maybe it wasn't the worst idea. Steve was up to speed on the story, after all. The real story, not the cover. "Fine. Get ready. You're driving."

The cockiness left town in a hurry. "What? No way, Chief. I'm on duty desk. Plus, I'm not going anywhere near --"

"Phil starts the overnight shift in fifteen minutes. And I need backup. Someone to stand watch. You just volunteered."

"But --"

"Thank you for volunteering," Jim intoned with finality, reaching for his cigarettes.

Which weren't there, because El was making him quit. Shit.

•

He had a bad moment at the main entrance, when the padlock wouldn't open. Some oil and elbow grease persuaded it, and then he shooed the rookie to watch from the truck, parked in the darkest corner of the parking lot.

The lab was surprisingly intact inside, but lifeless. The only sound was his own footfalls. There was a faint smell of mildew.

The lights didn't work. A borrowed electrical tester he plugged into a wall outlet showed zero. Seemed like the power had been shut off after all.

Still… "Loose ends," he muttered, heading for the stairs.

"How's it looking, Chief?" his radio squawked, shockingly loud in the dusty corridor.

He snatched up the radio. "Jesus, what part of 'radio silence' do you not understand? I'll check in with you in fifteen minutes. Over."

"Okay, okay. Sheesh."

Jim sighed and resumed retracing his steps from memory, gathering evidence by the beam of his flashlight. The stillness was oppressive. The dust he kicked up reminded him of the particles of alien pollen, or whatever, that he had seen in the tunnels. He left the balaclava on, just in case.

The last time he had been in here, he and Eleven had been on a mission to close the Gate. The place had been a horror movie, with flashing lights and alarms blaring, the corridors littered with the dead and dying, stalked by horrors from another dimension. Sightseeing had taken a backseat to keeping his girl alive.

This time was different.

The Marine detachment that had decommissioned the place had obviously been in a hurry. The lobby -- where Bob the Brain fell -- got cleaned up, but further in, there were several corridors where suspiciously dark stains were still visible.

The doors that hadn't been smashed were mostly unlocked and left ajar. Jim's pry bar took care of the rest.

The filing cabinets in the office of HNL Director Dr Sam Owens were similarly open, and empty. The other offices on that floor were the same --

His flashlight danced over empty eye sockets. Shit! What the…!

Jesus. One of the doctors had left behind his articulated skeleton model. Jim rubbed the sweat off his face under the mask, getting his heartbeat under control.

There was nothing useful here. Well, it had been a long shot, anyway. He was wasting time.

Speaking of time… "Still there? Over."

"Where else would I be? This is the most fun I've had in years."

"Can it. There's nothing up here. I'm heading downstairs. Fifteen minutes. Over."

"Okay. Be careful."

On his way down to the heart of darkness, Jim poked around until he found the electrical distribution room. Everything was labeled and seemed shipshape. The master relay was set to Off. So, nothing in the building was getting power. Duly noted. Somebody had to have thrown that switch manually. Last man out, turn off the lights.

From a cabinet, he scored a keyring, with what appeared to be master keys for the whole facility. Jackpot. Sure beat using the pry bar.

On to the main event.

All of the equipment in the testing and interrogation rooms in the sub-basement was intact, mothballed but ready to go. There was even some kind of ejection seat, like something an Air Force fighter jockey would train on. These rooms must have been idle when El opened the Gate, and never used since. Jim figured an interdimensional gateway had a way of monopolizing the eggheads' attention.

Correction. All of the rooms were intact, except for the biggest one at the end of the hallway. The last time Jim had seen it, that room had been thoroughly trashed by the Demodogs.

The Marines had removed everything down to the wall studs. Any trace of what had happened here was gone. It looked like an unremarkable reinforced concrete loft, bare and grimy.

And cracked, as if from an earthquake. The fissures running down the far wall hadn't been patched, although they no longer led to another dimension. Jim fingered his neck, remembering the prick of a hypodermic when Brenner's spooks had put a stop to his first unescorted visit here.

The elevator cage and winch were gone. The jagged hole in the middle of the floor had been covered with some steel panels. Jim reached for his radio.

"You read me? Over."

"Son of a bitch! That was a hell of a lot more than fifteen minutes, Chief. You trying to kill me?"

"Forget that, and get in here. Meet me at the entry point. And bring the rest of the rope. Out."

•

With Steve's help and some swearing, Jim was able to slide one of the heavy steel plates to one side. They pointed their flashlights down into the chasm.

Yawning black emptiness, beneath the cracked concrete slab. And… something else. Two wavering points of light.

A reflection?

"What am I looking at here, Chief?" Jim suddenly remembered that the rookie had never been here before.

"Set a webbing anchor on that I-beam. I'm going down for a better look."

•

It was only after he had rappelled twenty feet down into the cavern, dangling like a fucking piñata, that Jim fully understood what was reflecting his light back.

"It's half full of groundwater," he called up to Steve. "Must have seeped in through the tunnels."

"Well, don't go for a swim!" Harrington's voice reverberated weirdly around the cavern.

"Wasn't planning on it." He had a good look at what had been the below-ground part of the rift. Just a crack in the soil and bedrock now, running down to where it disappeared under black water. Nothing to see.

He and El had hung in midair down there, while she fought with a nameless horror from Hell… and won. He had been so proud of her. And, by all appearances, her sealing of the Gate had been permanent. This place was dead.

"Okay, I'm heading back up." He returned his attention to the ropes.

"Hey Chief… Uh, did you drop a flashlight or something?"

"What? No."

"Then what's that?"

Jim looked down, and froze. What the hell?

A slashing orange light, undulating beneath the water. It looked… familiar.

Jim squinted. He thought... He could just about make out a ghostly elevator cage down there. And in it, two people. A big man and a teenage girl. They wavered in the murk.

The hair on Jim's neck prickled. How...? It couldn't be.

The light was getting brighter.

"Uh, Chief…"

Jim wanted to see more, but he had a very, very bad feeling about this.

"Haul me up! Now!"

He was nearly there when it all went to hell.

Blinding light and a crushing wall of water and WHAM and boiling hot and screaming and drowning and cold and this is it, soldier --

"Chief! Chief! Hop!"

Jim gradually came to the understanding that, one, he could hear again, two, he was alive, three, Steve was shouting his name, and four, he was swinging crazily from the climbing rope, soaked to the skin. Oh, and five, he had lost his flashlight.

The water roiled with angry breakers, glimmering in Steve's flashlight beam.

•

"What happened? What was that? Are you okay? What the hell was that?" Harrington was gibbering, knuckles white on the wheel as they raced back to town in the Blazer.

"Shut up. I don't know. And shut up." Jim was all right physically, if banged up and a bit parboiled. But he was badly shaken. He needed to think.

It didn't make any sense. But he did know what he had seen.

An echo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not Stranger Things unless Steve Harrington is gibbering about something.


	3. Counterparts

Knock knock knock knock knock --

Who in the world was at her door, at this hour? Not for the first time, she felt a pang of fear. She lived pretty far out of town, and bad things could happen at night when nobody else was around.

Bull. Bad things could happen anytime at all. Let them try. Joyce opened the door.

His bulk was silhouetted in the porch light.

"Hop? What in the -- what's going on?" She squinted up at him. Something wasn't right.

The big man looked… strange. Spooked. It struck her that he wasn't wearing his hat. "Joyce, I need to talk to you. It's important. Are you alone?"

He always wore that damn hat. "It's the middle of the -- Of course I'm alone, what are you... Never mind, get in here."

She led him to the kitchen, trying to shake the cobwebs off her mind. Under the brighter lights, Hopper looked like he hadn't slept in days. His eyes were red. No, actually the skin around his eyes was a splotchy, angry pink. What the hell?

Well, first things first. She gestured vaguely at the kettle. "Uh, it's pretty late for coffee. Tea, maybe? I'm not sure if I have --"

"Joyce. I broke into the lab."

Her stomach fell. The lab. Where she lost Bob. Worse, she had heard that earnest, hushed tone before. It sounded like… oh, no. No. Who else would she lose this time? She dropped into a chair. "You broke… What? Why? And how did you get that sunburn? It's so..."

"Joyce, listen." He sat down as well, grimacing. "Something happened when we were in there. Something I don't understand. I need… Jesus, I don't know what I need. But I didn't know who else to talk to. Harrington was useless, freaking out…"

"Steve was there with you? Did he get hurt? Is he --"

"No no, he's fine. He wanted to drive me to the hospital. I sent him home." He started to run a hand over his face, then winced and dropped it to the Formica.

"Wait. You're hurt, aren't you. Don't lie to me, Hop! Where are you hurt? Apart from your face, I mean."

"I just got banged up. Some bruises, that's all. The wave knocked me against the slab."

"The wave? What in the hell are you -- wait. Stop." Obviously this called for something a lot stronger than tea. She surged to her feet, all business now, quickly gathered what she needed, and banged it all down on the table. Lonnie's long-forgotten bottle of tequila, two glasses -- because what the hell -- and the first aid kit. She poured a decent slug and slid the glass to him. "Drink. And take off your shirt so I can see."

He complied, sputtering after knocking back the rotgut. "Jesus. This stuff is rough as hell."

"That's right. Medicinal only," she agreed, amused, then gasped. With his black shirt removed, she could see some pretty ugly contusions along his ribs and spine. What could have done this? The man was built like a Spanish galleon. Just like she remembered. She pressed her lips together and reached for the kit. "You're lucky you didn't crack a rib -- or your silly skull."

"Tactical helmet," he grated between clenched teeth, not moving. Had he, in fact, broken a rib? He would never agree to go to the hospital, the big dumb bear.

The fondness in her thoughts brought her up short. Did she have feelings for him? The idea was silly. He was so… Hopper. She rolled her eyes.

Except that was bull, if she was honest with herself. Yes. She did. Since high school. Since that summer. Maybe she always would.

But it was complicated. Life after high school had very quickly become complicated. They had a shared history, yes, and a longstanding friendship. An understanding. But not romance. It was impossible, she thought firmly.

Maybe a little too firmly?

Fumbling with the gauze, she sighed. "All right, now tell me. From the beginning."

•

Punctuated with curses as she worked on his back, she dragged the story out of him.

"A memory of... of what happened. Okay," she ventured.

He grunted in assent as he put his shirt back on.

"But… I know this sounds -- how do you know it wasn't just a --"

"Because Harrington saw it too, and he wasn't even there the first time around. And because I got the shit kicked out of me by some kind of boiling tidal wave two seconds later." Hopper stood up, restless.

"So, whatever it was… it was real," she breathed.

"Yeah. A bit too real, to be honest." He shifted his shoulders gingerly, leaning against the counter.

"But I don't under -- I mean, I'm happy to listen, but… How did you think I could help with this… echo? I've never heard of anything like that."

Hopper hesitated.

"Joyce… Maybe Will would know something." He stared at the kitchen floor.

"What -- Will? Why would Will know anything?" But she knew. She knew exactly what he meant, and she felt the bile rising in her stomach. She snapped the first aid kit shut.

"He was… inside, Joyce. Inside the enemy. The Mind Flayer. Maybe, if we can get access to those memories --"

"No." The word bubbled up out of her before she could even think. That's what this was about? The sense of betrayal -- of panic -- was drowning her.

No. Not Will. Not again. No.

"Joyce --"

"No. You listen to me, now. We've given enough. My family has given enough!" She spat the words at his face like darts.

"I know. But El… isn't doing great. The nightmares --" Hop was uncharacteristically solemn.

"My son endured a living nightmare! You were there! You saw that -- that place. He nearly died! And then, a second time, with that horrible thing inside him! Controlling him! And you want me to put him through that again?" She was practically yelling at him now, tears prickling the backs of her eyes.

"I know, Joyce. I know! But there might not be another way to figure out what's going on, to help El…"

"Don't make me choose, Hop! Do not make me choose between them. That's not fair!"

"Mom?" 

Will, who slept like a log now -- a very gangly log -- was in the doorway, eyes wide, hair tousled. The raised voices had dragged him out of bed. He glanced at Hopper. How much had he overheard? "Mom, what's going on?" 

Hopper nodded to Will, then looked searchingly at Joyce.

"It's okay, sweetie. Go back to bed. We'll be quieter." She smiled at him, and hoped it wasn't too transparently brittle. Did he know they were talking about him? She would speak to him in the morning.

Her boy -- her second teenager, now nearly a man -- stared at the two of them for a beat, then retreated, self-conscious.

She continued, in a lower voice.

"I've worked and worked to raise these kids. Jonathan, Will, and even Jane, when you let me help. Jonathan took some of the load off me, yes. But I'm the mom. It was my responsibility, because Lonnie is… well, whatever he is, he hasn't been around. It has not been easy. Raising them has not been easy."

"I've been around, as much as I could," he blurted, and that made her soften for a moment. Because it was true. They weren't partners, and this wasn't a blended family… except for all of the ways it sort of was.

For starters, Will had an unbreakable bond with Jane. The two just seemed to get each other on an intuitive level, and words weren't even necessary. When either needed comfort, the other showed up as a matter of course.

Who did Hopper turn to for comfort? Well, he was guarded with his thoughts and feelings. His inner world was hidden, most of the time. But when he had issues with Jane, he turned to Joyce. In truth, she knew that he trusted nobody else when it came to his daughter, even after Jane Hopper's existence had been made public. Joyce thought back to that first panicky call about feminine hygiene products, a situation that had caught Hopper unprepared and at a loss. Joyce had had to rush over, comfort Jane and shoo her hovering father away. He had been overwhelmed, and hadn't put up a fight.

There had been many other times since then, times when Joyce had been the motherly influence. Times when she regretted never having had her own little girl.

Who did Joyce turn to, when she had problems? Hopper's name was at the top of a very short list. There really wasn't anyone else, and there hadn't been since Bob. Bob the hero, who fell to those monsters at the lab. The awful ache was gone, but Joyce still felt a pang when she thought of Bob. Hopper had helped her through the grieving process, and there had been a moment when -- but it had passed. Anyway, it was true that Hop would drop everything when she called. And it was undeniable that he had the kind of relationship with Jonathan and Will that tomboy Joyce had had with her own father.

But this wasn't about that. This was clear-cut, goddamn it.

"I know you have, Hop. And believe me, I appreciate everything you've done. But Jonathan is on his own, and Will is doing fine, now. So is Jane, except for those nightmares. After what she's been though, it's only -- But God help me, I love my kids, Hop. And I -- I love Eleven like she's my flesh and blood, too. You know that!"

She had used the wrong name, the secret name. She glared at Hop, defying him to call her on it. On any of it. He blinked, but said nothing.

"Look, I don't know what happened to you. But I'm not putting those kids through any more trauma. I won't do it. They're doing okay now. More than okay. And… I can't do this again. I'm pushing fifty and it's my turn now. I'm taking classes, starting over. It's my turn."

"You're forty-five --"

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but it's enough. Don't you think it's enough? What we've gone through… No. I'm the mom. I'm calling it. We're done. We've given enough, Jim."

His eyes widened at that. She could see that she had gotten through to him. She never, ever called him Jim.

He thought about it, coughed, sighed. "Okay. I'll… I'll try calling Doc Owens, tell him some story, try to figure out if he knows anything about this." He patted his pockets absently, looking for something, then gave up. It made him seem lost, frail somehow, and she abruptly felt ashamed.

She had let him down. He had come to her, and she had turned him down flat.

No. She was suddenly angry again. How dare he assume that she -- that Will -- would follow him into Hell, yet another time?

"You do that." She attempted an even tone, but it came out icy.

The words pooled between them like black water in a cave, far underground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Counter-parts. Because it takes place in a kitchen.
> 
> I wasn't happy with this chapter, so I made some changes.
> 
> Next up, the Party!


	4. Code Red

Will sounded upset.

Even over the phone, Dustin could tell. And Dustin didn't always catch that kind of thing. At seventeen, Dustin was aware of his own shortcomings, thanks very much -- but he was trying. Everyone said it, how "trying" he was, he thought with a grin. Will, on the other hand, was the most sensitive member of the Party. So… maybe, when Will was upset, everyone around him became more sensitive, by osmosis? Mental note -- more research needed.

Anyway, in Dustin's opinion, being upset was justified. Assuming Will had overheard correctly, this could be huge.

Hopper's encounter was quite a tale, even thirdhand. Uncanny goings-on in the mysterious, derelict government lab? Ghostly images of past events? Hell, it was practically a D&D campaign! Or Aliens! Except, wait, Will was upset. And El wasn't doing so great. Oh, and also, this was potentially end-of-the-world scary. Time to take stock.

"Eldritch visions, check. Interpersonal conflict, check. Nightmares, check. And you called me. Now, if you're invoking my services as the Party's Bard --"

Will was suddenly defensive. "Well, Lucas or Max would have insisted on going to see for themselves. And I couldn't call Mike! If El's nightmares are related to whatever happened in the lab, he… Well. He wouldn't understand why we -- why I'm not helping."

This was manifestly true. Mike and El were a two-for-one deal. Possibly even twelve-for-one, because Eleven plus one Mike equals... it was debatable. Anyway, Mike would take her side, guaranteed. It would cause a rift in the Party -- maybe irreparably.

No. Dustin was not going to let that happen.

Conflict assessment. "Scale of one to shit, Byers. How serious is this?"

The sound of a sigh came over the line. "I don't know. It sounded pretty bad. Hopper looked freaked out. He was hurt, but I don't know how badly. The first aid kit was out, anyway. And I heard him say Steve totally lost it when it happened. My mom was furious. There was some… yelling. She cornered me this morning, told me never to talk to anyone about it. Well, she said not to talk about anything that made me uncomfortable, but I know what she meant."

Secrets. Dustin hated secrets. Secrets like, oh, say, maybe hiding a pet Demodog from your friends. He still winced at the memory. It hadn't been his finest moment, and while he had apologised, maybe he hadn't ever quite atoned.

And if there was one thing a Bard could never be, it was atonal.

Okay, it wasn't a perfect pun, but this was short notice. And Dustin was now on a mission. A mission to save the Party.

Oh yeah, and the world too. Potentially. "Are you calling it? If you don't, I will."

Will was clearly conflicted. "Well… whatever my mom says, I think we need to figure out how to help El, and what to do next. Together, I mean. Even if it means talking about… stuff that happened to me. But it's a long way to get everyone out here, and my mom --"

"Okay, I'm calling it. Code Red. Answer your door when he knocks."

"What? When who knocks?" Will was saying as Dustin hung up. He would figure it out, and time was a-wasting.

He dialed another number from memory.

"Yello."

"Code Red. Mike's house, 30 minutes."

"Hello, Dustin. Yes, I'm fine, thank you for asking, dipshit." Steve sounded tolerant, not freaked out at all. Which Dustin took as a good sign, but also oddly lacking in an appropriate sense of urgency. Maybe he was still in shock from the eldritch visions?

"Hi, Steve. Will you be there?"

"Well, it is my day off. Um, what exactly is a Code Red, again? Did you get your period or something?" That Steve, such a card. Using humour to conceal his trauma.

"It means Party members show up, no questions asked."

"Oh. Right. Wait, since when am I --"

"Honorary seventh member. We'll roll you up a character sheet when you get there, okay? This is about… what you saw." He tried to put some nudge-nudge into the last word. This was taking too long.

"What I saw…? How do you know about… Jesus Christ. Okay." About time.

"And pick Will up on your way."

"Okay, can do."

"And Max."

"Max? That's not even close to on my way!"

"Guess you'd better hustle then, buddy. Bye!"

That went well. Next number. Please let her answer…

"Yeah?" Max was not exactly renowned for her etiquette.

"Code Red. Mike's house, twenty-five minutes."

"What? But I was going to the mall --"

"A Party member requires assistance. It is our duty to provide that assistance."

"Wait, are Code Reds still a thing? Dustin, what the hell is going on? Who's in trouble?"

No uncoded messages on an open channel! Had Max learned nothing from Wrath of Khan? "It's Jane. Steve's on his way to get you."

He could hear her absorbing the fact that he hadn't referred to her as El.

"Shit. Okay, I'll be here."

If only they had some kind of bat-signal. All this organizing was making Dustin hungry. But the next one was easy.

"Sinclair residence --"

"Code Red. Mike's house, twenty minutes."

"What? Seriously? I'm kind of in the middle of something here, Dustin --"

"It's, like, next door. You've got twenty minutes to send her home and get your ass in gear. I'm on my way, and you better be there." Honestly, did Lucas expect Dustin to solve all of his problems?

"Ugh. Fine. I hate you."

And finally, sliding into his sneakers, Dustin called the gracious host of this illustrious gathering.

"Hello?"

"Are you alone?"

"Dustin? My mom's out, but Holly's here. Why?"

"Code Red. Your house, fifteen minutes."

"Wait, what? How can you call a Code Red at my house?" Mike sounded indignant. Mike often sounded indignant, though.

"A Party member requires --"

"I know what it means, Dustin. But what's the emergency?" Now Mike was exasperated. He had quite a repertoire.

"I'll tell you when I get there. Keep everyone entertained until then. They should be arriving shortly -- Steve picked them up. Uh, maybe make some sandwiches? Yeah, ham and cheese, some lettuce, easy on the mustard. That would be great."

"Jesus, Dustin." And now, disgusted. Why wasn't Mike in Drama? He would be fantastic!

Mission accomplished, Dustin grabbed his supplies, banged out the door, leapt to his trusty Schwinn and was off, pedaling into the warm August air.

•

When he burst through the basement door, the room was already crowded and the air was kind of… jangly? Okay, yeah, jangly with annoyance. But not sandwiches. It was not even a little bit jangly with sandwiches.

Oh well, on to business. Working quickly, he erected the easel and flip chart. They all turned to look at him.

"I suppose you're all wondering why I've gathered you together here today," he intoned. He had always wanted to say that, and when would he get another chance like this?

"Jesus Christ, Dustin," moaned Lucas. Will just looked embarrassed.

Mike was apparently in no mood. "Dustin, what in the hell -- wait. You carried all that here on your bike?"

"Yep! Um, the easel kind of stuck out past the front wheel, but it wasn't too bad." He shrugged modestly.

"Surely you joust!" quipped Steve, clearly still in shock, poor guy. Dustin sent him a thumbs-up, along with the obligatory, "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley."

Max was entirely out of her slim reserves of patience. "For fuck's sake, Dustin, what's going on? You said El was in trouble. Where is she, anyway?"

Mike's head whipped around at that. Before things got derailed any further, Dustin flipped to the first sheet with a flourish. "All in good time. Behold the agenda for this meeting!"

The agenda, helpfully titled AGENDA in red marker, consisted of six items.

1\. Eldritch Visions  
2\. Interpersonal Conflicts  
3\. Nightmares  
4\. Additional Item(s)  
5\. Course of Action  
6\. Refreshments

They stared at him, nonplussed. Huh. Tough crowd. Mike opened his mouth to say something, and Dustin loudly called the meeting to order.

"Okay, Item One: What, exactly, happened inside Hawkins National Laboratory last night? Steve, the floor is yours. You can take a break any time, if you need to."

Steve blinked at that, but recovered. He stood awkwardly, waiting. There was a startled moment as it dawned on the others that Steve was not just there as a chauffeur. They took the hint, and got comfortable on and around the well-worn couch.

1.

"Okay, well I'm not supposed to discuss this with anyone. But you shitheads are already in on all the other secrets, so what the hell. Here goes…

"Hop and I broke into the old lab last night, or what's left of it. Don't ask me why, I got volunteered into it at the last second. I'm not cleared for investigations or anything yet. Guess Hop wanted company. Anyway, he must have had a good reason to go, but he didn't share it.

"There's no power in the building, so we did all our exploring by flashlight. Spooky as hell -- I don't recommend it, so don't get any ideas, dipshits. It's dangerous in spots. Didn't smell so great, either.

"There were a lot of smashed walls, cables hanging and shit, but the place is mostly in one piece. Eventually, we made it down to a big room in the basement. Hop said that's where it all went down, back in '84. Closing the Gate and all that. Only, somebody had gutted the place. I don't know what it looked like before, but it's stripped bare now.

"There was a big crack in the floor. Hop said it led down to the tunnels, but when we looked down… Jesus, it was dark down there. But something didn't seem right, so I rigged up a rope and heroically stayed behind while Hop went down to look. Turns out it's a huge cave, and it's full of water.

"That's when I spotted it, in the water under him. It looked like a shark cage, or an old-fashioned elevator, with people inside. It was fairly deep below the surface, hard to tell for sure how deep. But it was lit up like a Halloween pumpkin. And the people… I mean, it was tough to make out, with Hop swinging right in the way. I thought I was hallucinating, but it looked like the people were Hop and El. Or their ghosts, or something. Moving around down there, doing something. Gave me the quivering shits. Never seen anything like it, don't want to see it again.

"Then everything went to shit in a hurry. The water flew upwards, came right up out of the crack, and it was hot as hell! I swear, I just about fell in. Then it all poured back down, fizzing like a bottle of pop. I hauled the Chief out -- he was okay, thank God -- and we fucked off out of there. Left the climbing gear behind and everything.

"I wanted to take him to the hospital, but he swore up and down that he was okay. He told me to go home, and to keep my damn mouth shut. Uh, how am I doing so far?

"I guess that's pretty much it. Questions from the peanut gallery?"

There was a brief, stunned silence. Dustin was proud of Steve for getting it all off his chest like that, in one go.

"Yeah, I've got one. What the fuck was that?" Max blurted. Right to the point, that Max.

After a beat, Mike spoke up somberly. "A steam explosion. Sounds like a big steam explosion, underwater. The water might be the only thing that saved the Chief's life."

Will glanced at Mike, then away.

Lucas nodded agreement. "And before anyone asks me… No, there's no way a magma vent is opening up in this part of the world, least of all in the basement of the lab. It's all sedimentary rock around here, nothing igneous at all, and no geysers."

"Okay nerds, but I was talking about the ghosts." Max was, as usual, rolling her eyes.

"Whatever those images were, they weren't ghosts," declared Lucas, shaking his head.

"So, what, you're saying it was a projection? A hologram, like in Scooby Doo? It was the sketchy caretaker all along?" needled Max.

"He's saying we don't know what it was. But you're right about one thing, it couldn't have been deliberate. Think about it, guys. The building is dead, like Steve said. Nobody knew the Chief was going in last night -- it sounds like it was Top Secret. Who would think to set up such an elaborate ruse? And for what? To scare him off?" said Mike reasonably.

"Uh, yeah, Hopper kind of doesn't scare easily," Steve offered.

"But if it wasn't deliberate, why did it happen when they were in the building? Coincidence?" Max asked, incredulous.

Mike shrugged. "It could be happening every night, for all we know. Nobody has been inside in years."

"Creepy images appearing every night sure sounds like ghosts to me, Sinclair," said Max, crossing her arms.

"Ghosts aren't real! Besides, how can there be a ghost of someone who isn't dead? And how can an elevator have a ghost?" Lucas protested, stung. Dustin liked it better when those two were going out. Much less jangly.

"Echo." Will had spoken quietly, but everyone turned to stare at him. "The Chief called it an echo."

Dustin took that as his cue. "Which brings us to item two on the agenda. Chief of Police Jim Hopper and Officer Trainee Steve Harrington witnessed something in the lab. What was the aftermath? Will, your turn. Leave nothing out."

2.

Will got to his feet. "Um, okay. Well, Hopper showed up at my house late last night. I was in bed, but the voices in the kitchen got me up.

"Anyway, Mom must have asked him what happened, because I heard him telling her the story, pretty much like Steve just said. I only caught the tail end of it, but it sounded like the echo was sort of like a movie of when El closed the Gate. And he was there when that happened, so he would know what it looked like.

"Um, he talked about getting bounced around by a 'boiling tidal wave' right after. He sounded really spooked. Oh, and the skin of his face looked scalded when I saw him, like a lobster or something."

Steve winced. Mike and Lucas exchanged a glance, nodding. 

"So, anyway, my mom had no idea what it all meant. She wanted to know why he went to her."

Will paused, gathering his thoughts.

"That's when I decided to find out what was going on. I went to the kitchen to see for myself.

"Hopper was dressed all in black, like a SWAT uniform. He looked weird, and he was hurt. I don't know how badly. He was standing stiffly, like he was in pain, and my mom had the first aid kit out. Oh, and a bottle of alcohol. I don't know if that's important.

"My mom was really upset, but she was trying to hide it. She sent me back to bed, so naturally I… well, I kind of continued eavesdropping."

Lucas gave a thumbs-up at that, grinning. Will blushed and went on.

"Hopper thinks whatever is happening in the lab is affecting El. He doesn't understand it, and I guess his contacts, like Doctor Owens, have moved on since the lab got shut down. He needs inside information, so he can protect her. So, he…" Will stopped, looking at Mike.

"Go on," Dustin said encouragingly.

"He wanted my mom's permission to ask me about… what I know. What I can remember. From back in '84. When… he… was inside me."

"The Mind Flayer," Mike whispered. The others were frozen, aghast.

Will nodded grimly. "Hop figured, I don't know, that I still have, like, insider knowledge of the enemy. That I could tap into it, or be hypnotized or something, and help him to figure out how to help El."

He sighed. "Mom turned him down. She kind of lost it. She's never that angry. She said I've already been through enough. El, too. She forbade him from even talking to me about it. She didn't exactly kick him out of the house, but she also kind of did, if you know what I mean.

"And today, she told me not to talk about what I overheard, either. But I think we do need to talk about it. I want to help, if I can. Secrets… don't help anyone."

Dustin muttered an amen to that. Lucas and Steve made supportive noises, too.

Max, however, could no longer contain herself. "Okay, I'm done. I'm sorry, Will, but I need answers, now! What is going on with El? Why isn't she here?"

"What did he mean, the lab is 'affecting' El?" Mike was asking at the same time.

"Item three! Nightmares, comma, girlfriend suffering from. Mike, if you please," Dustin trumpeted.

"Me? Wait, do you mean… oh." Mike stood up uncertainly. Will took his spot on the couch, not meeting anyone's eyes, not even when he recieved a reassuring pat from Lucas.

3.

Mike coughed nervously. "Um, El has been suffering from nightmares lately. Bad ones. She used to dream about it every so often, at first. Not so much in the last couple of years, though. You know, a bad dream, you sweat it out and then laugh about it later, right? But then, last month… she started waking up screaming, a couple of times per night. She would tell me about it the next morning, but then she stopped. I asked, but she said it's nothing. I guess she didn't want me to worry.

"Reading between the lines of what she told me, I think they're always about the lab. Brenner, the Demogorgon, the Demodogs, the Mind Flayer, all of them put in an appearance, sure. But it's always at the lab. She --" Mike's voice broke.

"Sorry. It's just… she's had so many bad things happen to her, in that one fucking building. Her childhood was ruined there, and it sucks, and there's not a thing anyone can do about that. And okay, fine, she's free now, she has a life, and she's actually happy, I mean really happy, most of the time now… She tells me she is, anyway. She tells me I make her happy." He swallowed hard, his eyes shining.

"But that goddamn fucking building is still standing there. It weighs on her mind, I think. It sure as shit weighs on mine. It's like -- like as long as it's there, it's a reminder. A reminder of the shit she had to go through. It's not fair. Sometimes I just -- I just want to burn it to the ground!"

Unclenching his fists, he took a breath and went on.

"She's been… very tired this week. When we're together, she just wants to sleep. That's why we haven't been hanging out. Um, I thought it was just, you know, the end of summer approaching, school starting up again next month. She's upset that she won't be graduating with us in June, I know that. I mean, she tried, really hard. You all saw how much she studied last year. And she's brilliant. She's the smartest person I know. But it's almost impossible to skip a grade, once they place you. I guess she doesn't want to feel like she's a burden, you know, to the group... To me. Shit.

"But I never thought… I guess I'm an idiot. Jesus, is she sleeping at all? It must be really bad, for Hopper to... I'm such an idiot."

Mike trailed off awkwardly, then returned to the couch, brooding. Will squeezed Mike's arm.

Max, who would usually have jumped at the chance to agree with Mike's self-assessment, looked close to tears.

There was a lull. Dustin considered what Mike had said.

He felt a brief pang of jealousy. Mike and El. He wished that he could be one half of a whole like that. Or was it one-twelfth? The math was iffy. Anyway, Mike was taking Eleven's pain on himself, that was clear. It was the worst-kept secret of the century that he loved her, but his devotion was rarely so stark. And, of course, it was well-known that Eleven had zero tolerance for threats against Mike. They were partners.

Maybe he would have that someday, too. A loving partnership. Dustin hoped so.

4.

He cleared his throat, and tapped the flip chart.

"Item four: Any discussion items we need to add to the agenda?"

It was a bit pro forma, but hey, you never knew.

"Okay, yeah. I've been wondering why you called your Code Red here, at Mike's house." Lucas sounded guarded. Dustin blinked. This was worthy of discussion?

"Really? I mean, it's pretty obvious. If I had given Mike enough advance notice for him to go… well, anywhere else, he would have called El first. And that might have led to… well, some jangly questions before all the facts were in. Getting all the facts was the whole point of the Code Red. So I let him think everyone was already about to arrive here. Which they were, except El, because the meeting is about her."

Mike looked affronted, then glum. The range the guy had was astonishing. The others just stared at Dustin.

"What? I improvised."

"What I meant, dumbass, was why hold it here, in the only house that we know for sure was bugged by agents from the lab?" Lucas spoke slowly, as if Dustin was a simpleton.

Dustin could feel his face going hot. "In '83! There's nobody listening after five years, Lucas --"

"You don't know that --"

Mike cut them off. "Both of you, shut up. I took care of it. There are no bugs. Remember that ultra-sensitive short range receiver I built for Science Fair, freshman year?"

Lucas goggled at him. "Wait, that was for…"

"Of course! What, you thought I just wanted the blue ribbon? I found six different bugs. Buried them all in the back yard. I swept again a year later, just to be sure."

Dustin was impressed. "So, you're saying this house is the only one we know for sure isn't bugged?"

"Here, and the Chief's place. Even if anyone is still listening, there's nothing to hear. But there could still be remote wiretaps on the phone lines. No way to tell." Mike shrugged.

Dustin nodded at Lucas, vindicated. "Teamwork. Okay, any other items?"

There were none. He flipped to the next sheet, which was labeled COURSE OF ACTION -- DISCUSSION.

"Fifth item. What are we going to do? A Party member is in difficulty. Indeed, she isn't here today, specifically so we can decide how to help her. The floor is open."

5.

Lucas was ready, and began listing points on his fingers.

"Okay, steam explosions. What could create that amount of energy? There's no electricity in the lab. No boiling lava under the lab. So there's no source for the energy required to superheat the water and produce a steam explosion. There's no power to run any kind of projector, either.

"The echo appeared in the one place on earth that a rift between the two universes was opened, and then closed. The images were of that exact event: closing the Gate.

"The only reason Hopper was there in the first place was because El is having nightmares. Nightmares about what happened to her in the lab.

"It all has to be connected. It's either El, or the Upside-Down."

Mike turned tentatively to Will. "I really don't want to ask this, but --"

"I don't know anything, Mike. About echoes, or explosions, or the enemy's plans." Will sighed. "What I remember about -- about being possessed by the Mind Flayer… is his greed. He needs to possess, or else destroy. But most of all, underneath everything else, I remember his hatred. He hates, the same way that we breathe. He hates that about us, that we can breathe, that we have freedom and love. He hates us.

"He hates. It's all he knows. With him inside my head, controlling me… It was like every ounce of love, every drop of blood in my body, had been replaced with freezing cold poison."

There was not a sound in the room as Will paused and looked each of them in the eye. Dustin couldn't remember him ever speaking so openly about his ordeal. And it had been nearly four years.

He sighed again. "But if you want my opinion, this… isn't him. It's too weird, too subtle. It doesn't feel like hate to me. He wouldn't want to remember that setback, when El slammed the door in his face. A deliberate echo of that? No. Never." He shook his head with a grimace.

"That's what I think, for whatever it's worth."

Mike nodded and slumped a bit. Everyone had been holding their breath.

"Okay. It's worth a lot, Will. Thanks." He reached out to clasp Will's shoulder, a gesture of solidarity that earned him a wan smile.

Mike gathered his thoughts for a moment.

"We know there's a correlation. Now we need causation. If we're eliminating the Upside-Down as a source, one of two things has to be true. Dustin, write this down."

Dustin held up the marker, poised.

"Hypothesis A: El's use of power echoes around naturally. Mechanism unknown. Logically, the more power she uses, the stronger the echo will be. It's not crazy to think she's sensitive to that, especially when she's asleep. Hence the nightmares. I think this is what Hopper is thinking… except that he's also assuming the Upside-Down is involved."

Dustin scribbled on the flip chart.

"Or, Hypothesis B. She's having nightmares, because who wouldn't, after all the shit she's been through. Most of the shit happened in that building. When she's asleep, she's not in control of her powers, and her unconscious mind created that image… and that explosion. Mrs Byers might be thinking something similar to this.

"Bottom line: The nightmares are either the cause, or the effect. We need to figure out which... Before it happens again."

"Okay. So, how do we figure out if it's a 'natural' supernatural echo? And what does that even mean?" Max wasn't needling for once. It was a genuine question.

Lucas tilted his head. "I think we need to understand her powers. Not the way she understands them, like how to use them, but the actual way they affect spacetime. It's not just magic. The mechanism, whatever it is, could be what's generating echoes. We need to run some experiments."

"Yeah. This is breaking new ground. I don't think the lab assholes ever got that far. I mean, as long as their 'weapon' was working, they had no reason to care. And then, the Gate happened, so they had other things on their minds." Mike grimaced.

Will suddenly looked thoughtful.

Max pointed at a lamp in emphasis. "We know one thing. El's powers? They're electromagnetic. Ever notice how the lights go nuts when she's using her powers?"

They all stared at her. "What? I take physics too. I'm not just a skater-punk goddess. Nerds." She shook her head in disgust.

"She's right. Remember when she nuked the Demogorgon? The lights were flickering like crazy!" said Dustin reverently.

"And when she found Will, the lights went out…" whispered Lucas.

"And when she closed the Gate, every light for miles around brightened." Mike was nodding. "An inductive field, maybe?"

There was silence for a moment.

"On the other hand, if it is El's subconscious mind, we need to gather data while she's asleep. Which means, again, we need a lab setting of some kind," said Lucas.

Max slapped her thigh in frustration. "Where the hell are we going to find a lab with the kind of equipment we need? Like, I dunno, an EKG. The hospital? A college, maybe?"

"There's nothing in town. Ball State would be closest, I guess…" mused Lucas.

"Can you even get access to a place like that, without being faculty? It would probably cost a lot of money, if it's even possible. Plus, it would have to be secret," said Mike.

Will finally raised his voice. "Guys. Hopper said something about… testing rooms. In the basement of the lab, full of equipment. Intact, maybe never used."

There was a silence.

"There's no power," said Steve slowly.

"We assume there's no power to the building. We'd have to check their circuit breakers to be sure," said Lucas.

Steve now looked alarmed. "Um, yeah, no. This is not a thing. Did you guys not hear me? It's dangerous in there. What if another one of those water bombs happens?"

Max protested, "How are we supposed to figure out anything without conducting any experiments?"

Steve was adamant, which was kind of cute. "Absolutely not. Bad enough I'm here, talking to you. Hop would have my ass for this. Besides, he's got the keys to the place."

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but I agree with Steve. I'm supposed to take El back to the lab? Where she was abused all those years? To run more experiments on her? No way. Fuck that," said Mike.

Will spoke gently. "Mike… maybe being there with you -- no danger in sight, just the people who love her -- maybe that will help her to see that it's just a building. That it can't hurt her anymore. Maybe you can make new memories there, erase the old ones. I don't know, is that crazy?"

It didn't sound completely crazy. Mike looked unconvinced, though.

"Anyway, Mike, you need to find out whether El was asleep when the echo happened. And then, we need accurate timings of the two biggest uses of her powers that we know about: the opening and closing of the Gate," said Lucas.

"The closing was Monday, November 5th, 1984, at just past three in the morning, " Mike replied by rote. Will gave him a sympathetic glance. Dustin remembered Mike's gut-wrenching worry for Eleven that night.

"I looked at my watch," he went on. "You don't forget something like that. But the opening? Not sure. I'll have to ask."

"We need to show Hopper that he's not alone, trying to help El through this," said Will.

"So, once we have some basic data," concluded Max, "we go to the Chief with our findings… and get those keys."

It seemed, if nothing else, a feasible way to start.

6.

The phone was ringing upstairs.

Dustin rubbed his hands together. "Productive meeting! Okay, final item: sandwiches. Mike?"

"Huh?"

"Refreshments? I thought we agreed there would be sandwiches."

Holly's voice called from the kitchen, "Mike! Janie's on the phone!"

"El," said Mike absently, and he dashed up the stairs without so much as a backwards glance.

It was a thankless task, this moderation thing, Dustin mused. Thankless and sandwichless.

"You wanna go forage for leftovers?" he asked Lucas.

No response. Lucas was staring at the floor, his jaw set.

"Lucas? Earth calling Lucas?"

Lucas looked up. "There's something else. I didn't want to say it. Not with Mike around."

"So spill, Sinclair," said Max.

"Just listen. We assumed that either the nightmares are the cause and the echo is the effect, or vice versa. But logically, there's a third possibility. Call it Hypothesis C. What if the nightmares and the echo aren't the cause, or the effect, of each other? What if they're both the effect of something else?"

Max spread her arms wide. "But what's the source of the energy, then? You guys said it, there's nothing there. We're ruling out the Upside-Down. And nobody else could be wielding El's powers. That's --"

"You know what El is short for. There were ten others before her, and maybe more after," said Lucas flatly.

"Nobody could be as powerful as…" Dustin trailed off.

Lucas was shaking his head. "We don't know that."

Will looked puzzled. "Okay, sure, but why would another telekinetic want to… unless somebody else is telling them what to do…"

"The government shut the lab down. It's dead. Assets dispersed. Somebody would have to have hauled them back to Hawkins, from wherever they bugged out to," said Steve.

Lucas pointed at both of them. "Exactly. And if that's what happened, who would the prime suspect be? Somebody with a grudge, maybe? Somebody who knows the lab, and disappeared, presumed dead… ?"

Oh, no. Dustin felt his face go slack.

"Holy fuck, Stalker. You mean…" Max was suddenly pale as a sheet, staring at Lucas, her freckles like beacons. She had forgotten to call him Sinclair.

Lucas nodded impassively. "Brenner."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this was so dry. It's mostly setup for what happens next.
> 
> Next, by the way, is Mike.


	5. Minefields

Mike retreated to the couch after his humiliating monologue about El's nightmares. There was a rushing in his ears. 

He had very nearly broken down in front of his friends. But he knew they didn't mind. He had good friends. Actually, he had great friends. The best in the world. They wouldn't call him on it, not even Max. No, something else was bothering him.

The dismaying revelations about the lab certainly weren't making him any less twitchy than usual. But Steve had described what sounded like a steam explosion. His words had sliced through Mike's thoughts like shrapnel, and he was still reeling.

Mike had… a bit of a history with explosions. His mind drifted back two years, to 1986, freshman year at Hawkins High.

•

He would never forget that January day. Bitterly cold and dry, but the sun bright and warm. An optimistic day. Spring wasn't on its way yet, but it was rumored to have travel plans.

He was sitting in physics class, watching the launch. Lucas grinned back at him from the next row. They had both been following the space program for years, their walls adorned with posters of rockets. But this was a rare treat that even the dumb jocks and headbangers in the class could appreciate. The AV cart had been granted pride of place at the blackboard. The television image tracked the astronauts in their blue jumpsuits as they strode to the pad, waving jauntily.

It was a cold morning in Florida, too. The camera zoomed in on icicles hanging from the launch gantry. Wait, had that ever happened before?

The countdown ended and the spacecraft surged into the sky. The whole classroom cheered. Mike and Lucas exchanged a high-five. Everything was going perfectly. And then, with no warning, the image of a flower appeared. Mike blinked in confusion. A flower of smoke and fire… 

An explosion. The boosters kept flying, impervious, but where was the orbiter? Smoking debris arced away. The scorched crew cabin, powerless, was plummeting to the sea. Seven aboard, one of them a teacher.

Falling.

Mike had fallen too. He knew what it felt like. That feeling burned through his memory, like a rift between worlds -- the feeling of frozen dread. He still dreamed about it, sometimes. Dead, but still falling, guts churning, wind rushing past, watching the water rise up to obliterate him, waiting for the impact he wouldn't have time to feel, waiting…

He had fallen for two seconds, at most. He knew the third would have killed him. He had learned it in this very classroom. Thirty-two feet per second, per second, gave sixty-five mph after three seconds. Whether he hit the water in the quarry, or the rocks at the shore, he was already dead. But then… she had saved him.

He found out later that the astronauts fell for two minutes, forty-five seconds. There was nobody to save them.

He hoped, he devoutly hoped that they weren't conscious all the way down. Awake, falling, waiting. Knowing they were already dead. Waiting for the shattering impact with the Atlantic, two minutes and forty-five seconds later. He couldn't imagine it.

Or maybe he could, which was infinitely worse.

They strode in, and they fell.

On that cold January morning, Lucas turned to look at Mike, eyes wide with shock. His lips were moving. But, transfixed by the horrible flower unfolding on the TV, unable to look away, all Mike could hear was the wind rushing past his ears, blocking out the screams.

•

Three months later, spring was preparing summer's arrival, Lucas and Max had broken up again, and the scale of a disaster in Soviet Ukraine was becoming clear.

An explosion had wrecked a reactor, in a place called Chernobyl. Behind the Iron Curtain, sure, but information was trickling out just the same. Corners had been cut, safety features bypassed, protocols ignored. The burning reactor was spewing death downwind.

The emergency crews suited up and went in, to try to douse the fire. They must have known, some of them. But they went in anyway. After, they spoke of pins and needles in their limbs, and a metallic taste, as they vomited and died.

They strode in, and they fell.

And Mike heard the rushing wind again.

•

Two months after that, the Rogers Commission issued its report on the Challenger accident.

That was when Mike first heard of Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist. Feynman was, in his way, a storyteller. Kind of like how Mike told stories. Plot, and character. What, and who.

Crucially, Feynman didn't give a shit about the Commission on which he sat. He cared only about the truth. This guy owed no allegiance, hadn't asked for this gig, and had no axe to grind.

No, this guy, during a televised hearing, dropped a sample of O-ring material in a tumbler of ice water, and proved that it lost its elasticity at freezing. Like the temperature at the Cape on January 28th. He cut through all the bullshit and said, "This is your problem, right here."

But he was a storyteller. The "what" was only half the story. So he did his research, talked candidly to all the characters behind the scenes, and asked them what they really thought. And he told their story, in the final report.

It was a pretty compelling story. It was about two cultures, as distinct as D&D dwarves and elves, speaking different languages. The story was about concerned engineers who, knowing the danger, did everything they could to stop the launch. It was also about managers, who, with an irrational faith in a technology they didn't understand, thought they knew better.

They didn't. They were lying, to themselves and to everyone else.

The managers said, "Go for launch." And seven fell.

They didn't have to die. Mike heard the sound again.

•

By the time the big Midwest earthquake happened, in June of the following year, Mike had lost any lingering trust for so-called authority figures.

There had been no warning before the 5.0 tremor. Nobody had died, but it broke glass all across town, on a warm evening at suppertime. All across the region, actually. A region that hadn't seen an earthquake in decades.

It felt like an explosion. Like the end of the world.

And Mike heard it again. The rushing in his ears drowned out the rumbling of the Earth, and the rattling of every loose object in the house. He felt the dread. Waiting for the impact he wouldn't have time to feel. Waiting.

Mike remembered that Holly, who had sought the comfort of her big brother's arms, wound up comforting him instead.

•

Gorbachev was in charge of the USSR, Glasnost was a new vocabulary word, people said the Cold War was ending… and Mike trusted none of it. Not that he harbored a grudge against the Soviets. Maybe he should have, after the events of '85, but he didn't mistrust Russians in particular. After all, they loved their children too, like Sting said. Mike just didn't believe that the new "openness" changed anything about human nature. With the best will in the world, screwups still happened. People still got complacent. And charlatans still lied to gain power, everywhere.

His parents were staunch Republicans, firmly on the side of conformity and tradition. To Mike, it was all image, with no substance. Kind of like his home life... but some things couldn't be said. He was careful not to show what he thought of that smarmy Reagan asshole around the house, if only to avoid an argument.

He knew, as clearly as he knew the shape of her lips, that the people in charge only communicated through useful lies. The purpose of the lies was to spread complacency, or fear, in the minds of people like his parents. Frightening lies to inflame the sheep, or comforting lies to pacify them, when it was expedient. We'll save you from the evil Commies! Don't worry about that completely unremarkable top-secret lab.

They would say anything for power. He knew this to be true, beyond any possible doubt.

But Mike had zero patience for manufactured fears. He had known, since the age of twelve, that the universe, all by itself, was more than dangerous enough. Monsters from your worst nightmare would snatch away the people you cared about, if you weren't careful. If you were the leader, and you fucked up. If you led the way to a dead end.

And sure, maybe you could recover from something like that. From the guilt. From not keeping your promise. Maybe you would manage to figure out who you were, afterwards -- because you sure as hell weren't that other guy anymore. Maybe you would be able to bounce back from being broken and hollow and rotten inside. Or maybe not.

Or maybe, you were the luckiest goddamn fucking guy in history. Maybe you got a second chance, after a year in limbo. A chance you didn't deserve, in any way… but a chance just the same.

The bottom line was this:

There were plenty of real things to worry about. And lies were lies. Lies led to bad decisions. Lies led to failures. Lies hurt people. Lies killed.

The USGS had failed to predict the '87 earthquake.

The Soviet nuclear regulators had failed to prevent a foreseeable disaster at Chernobyl.

And NASA had failed to protect the Challenger astronauts, despite knowing there was a problem.

Most people saw no connection between the three. But to Mike, they were inextricably linked. Comforting lies had been chosen over inconvenient facts.

Mike would do better. He had to. Nobody else was going to, that much was clear. His hero Feynman had died in February. Nobody gave enough of a shit to do a proper job, or else they were distracted by lies.

He had already failed once, when he was just a kid. He hadn't been able to protect her. And he had lost her.

It was the central lesson of his life, and he had learned it when he was twelve. He had failed her. He had lost her.

He sure as fuck wasn't going to let it happen again.

Question everything.

Predict. Prevent. Protect.

•

Mike became aware that Lucas and Dustin were arguing. That wasn't unusual -- like, at all -- but the phrase "at Mike's house" caught his attention, so he tuned in to what they were saying.

Dustin was admitting that he had engineered the Code Red to prevent Mike from contacting El beforehand. Wait, what? Did he really think Mike was so smitten he would have circled the wagons with El, shutting down the whole...

Huh.

Well. Dustin might not be 100% wrong.

But then, out of the blue, Lucas brought up the listening devices.

Really? They thought he would have allowed this meeting to go ahead if there was even a chance the government assholes were still listening? How incompetent did they think he was, anyway? Jesus, who knew how many times he'd had conversations with El about Top Secret stuff in this very room!

Irritated, he cut them off. They had completely forgotten about Operation Bug Stomp! Okay, fine, only Mike called it that, but he was pretty sure he had mentioned it. 

Mike's annoyance had banished all thoughts of falling. He was fully invested in the discussion about what to do next… and he suddenly realised what that meant. It meant that he had to address the elephant in the room. Who else was going to?

It was an unwritten rule. They had all been through trauma, but what Will had endured was orders of magnitude worse. And he never, ever spoke about it, not even cryptically. So they never brought it up.

But, they needed answers that only Will could give them. And Mike and Will had a special bond. Mike had always been very protective of the smaller boy. He figured everyone knew it, although it was another unspoken topic. So, they could all feel the question coming, but they were waiting for Mike to ask it.

So, he turned to Will, and almost before he got the words out, Will was answering.

And, as he had feared, it was harrowing. Mike resisted the urge to tell Will that they would figure it out another way. He settled for reaching out to him, once he was done, and giving him a squeeze. Will returned a watery look that told him they were okay.

With that out of the way, and the Mind Flayer eliminated as a source for the Echo, it was time to plan.

Mike was good at that. It wasn't that different from telling a story, after all.

His friends would never let him get away with a bad story. They all had hyper-sensitive bullshit detectors. They would poke and prod the plan until it made sense to everyone.

And Mike wouldn't have had it any other way.

•

Holly was calling his name. El was on the phone! Mike's mind raced as he shot up the basement stairs, ducking his head at the low spot. He had some questions, but he didn't quite know how to ask them.

One question in particular.

Explosions aside, the Code Red meeting had left a pit in his stomach. Hopper was not the type to go off half-cocked. If he had resorted to breaking into the abandoned lab, he must have had one hell of a good reason. And the reason had nothing to do with standard police work. Standard stuff would have meant a warrant, and broad daylight. The only possible impetus was his daughter.

El was suffering, that much was clear, but Mike had been too clueless to figure it out. It felt like another failure, and that was unacceptable.

And she hadn't turned to him. He wasn't disappointed, it was just that…

Okay, fine, he was hurt.

Why hadn't she told him how bad it was getting?

Did El know that her dad had broken into the lab? Mike thought it unlikely. Hopper was not one to telegraph his plans.

How would she react to Steve's story? Not well, he suspected. She would be devastated that Hopper got hurt because of her.

What about the fact that her friends had called an emergency meeting to discuss her, without inviting her? Damn it, Dustin! She was going to feel blindsided.

This was not going to go well. He couldn't do it over the phone. He would have to go to Hopper's place and speak to her in person, on her turf. Yeah, that would be best.

He debated bringing backup. El's best friend Max, for example. Or her sort-of-stepbrother Will. Would more people just make her feel cornered, though, like she was being babysat?

Oh, shit. Holly. He was watching Holly. His mom would murder him if he left his sister here alone. She was insanely protective of the eight-year-old. Probably because her other two kids had become demon hunters right under her nose.

But, hold on. El and Holly adored each other. El wouldn't fly off the handle with his little sister around. Maybe taking her along wasn't such a bad idea. Was it a bit sneaky, though?

Well, he had to ask El about the day she tore open the rift between universes. Presumably, it was November 6th, 1983, the day Will went missing. He needed to know for sure, though, and roughly what time.

The thing was, El did not like to talk about the lab. Actually, that was a huge understatement. It was almost as if those memories were walled off in her mind. All these years later, Mike had only been able to glean bits and pieces. The last thing he wanted was for El to be bracketed by unwritten rules, like Will was.

Although... Now that he thought about it, he probably hadn't made it any easier for her. Each new revelation about her abusive childhood had filled him with such blind, murderous rage that he could almost feel his hands locking around Brenner's throat. Maybe she preferred to just drop it. She hated to upset him.

Christ, why was he such an idiot? She needed his open arms for support, not his clenched fists. That was why she hadn't reached out to him!

He would fix this.

"Hi, El!" He knew he was grinning at the phone like an imbecile, all apprehension gone.

"Mike…" Her breathy voice sounded relieved, trusting. It was a tone she only ever used with him, and it set his jaded seventeen-year-old heart to pounding. Every damn time, since the first time she said his name, five years ago.

"Are you feeling okay today?"

"Yes. I had a good sleep last night." That was interesting. Mental note.

"Great! I'm on my way over. Um, is it okay if Holly comes, too? I'm watching her until my mom gets back."

"Of course she can come."

"Awesome! See you soon!" He hung up the phone, still grinning. Every damn time.

He raised his voice. "Hey Holl, wanna go visit El?"

"Ellie said she wants to see me?" Holly squeaked, bouncing in from the living room.

"Yeah, but she said it's okay if I'm there, too," Mike teased. "Go get ready."

Mike's friends were still talking about the Echo when he went back downstairs. His mind, however, was whirling with ways he could nudge El towards talking about the opening of the Gate. She would see right through him…

But, wait. In the meantime, if he just wanted to check the theory, he didn't need to know the exact date or time… The Opening was about a year before the Closing. If the echoes were predictable, another explosion should already have happened, about a year ago, in the same spot the Gate was opened. Not in the cavern -- the Demodogs dug that later -- but rather…

"Hey, Harrington?" Mike interrupted a hushed discussion about something he didn't catch.

"Yello."

"In that room in the basement --"

"It's more like a loft, actually," Steve mused.

"Okay. In that loft… did you see any evidence of recent heat damage? Scorching, melting, anything like that? Like from a fire." Mike noticed that Lucas suddenly seemed interested in the answer.

Steve, however, was nonplussed. "Heat damage. Well, the floor around that hole was blackened. Could have been scorch marks, I guess. Hard to say. There were steel plates covering the hole, and we only moved one of them. They're heavy as shit." He shrugged in apology.

"Okay... How about the walls? The ceiling? Hey, what about those steel plates?"

"Uh, the place is reinforced concrete, standard-issue. Dusty as hell, too. No recent signs of fire that I could see. The floor plates? Those bad boys looked brand-new. Still had the manufacturer stickers on them."

Huh. Either the echoes weren't predictable, or Mike was missing something. Back to the drawing board.

What did he know for sure? Three and three-quarter years was the echo interval for the Closing. Forty-five months, say. Well, he definitely needed finer precision than that.

"Do you know the exact time the echo happened last night?"

"What, you think I was looking at my watch while the world blew up, dipshit? Okay, okay, give me a sec. I guess it would have been around… 11:45?"

"Okay, that works."

Mike looked at his friends, who had gathered around expectantly.

"Everyone, here's the deal. I'm leaving with Holly to go see El. I don't know what time we'll be back. My mom should be home by four. If she gets back before you leave, she's going to ask if you're staying for dinner. You will not take advantage of her generosity. You will say, repeat after me, 'That's very kind of you, Mrs Wheeler, but we were just leaving.' "

Dustin moaned in apparent agony. "But Mike! A Karen Wheeler dinner... You don't just turn that down!"

Mike ignored him, addressing the whole group instead. "Everyone, stay in the loop. We'll figure this out. And... thanks, guys."

He meant, thanks for coming. And thanks for caring. And thanks for being the best friends in the world. He tried to put all of that into those two words, and he hoped they would get it.

"You know the drill. Last one out, shut the door."

•

"El, can you tell me about the day you opened the Gate?"

Might as well just bite the bullet, he figured. Today was a good day. She seemed stronger, less exhausted.

They had already gone over the events of the night before. Well, mostly, anyway. Mike left out Hopper getting hurt. And some of the details of the Code Red. She had taken it fairly well, he thought, although she had been very quiet over their afternoon snack. Was it possible to eat an Eggo thoughtfully? Seemed like it was.

El looked up from the jigsaw she had started with Holly, a finger in her hair halted mid-twirl. She was obsessed with hair. God, she was beautiful, even with her eyes narrowed in confusion. "Why?"

"I just had a couple of questions. To nail down the timeline. I know you couldn't tell time back then, but maybe we could figure out when the lab workers changed shifts --"

"No." It sounded final. But Mike thought he could see a hesitation in those eloquent hazel eyes.

"El, I know you don't like to talk about this…"

"It's from before. Before Day One. I'm not… her anymore." She gestured vaguely at herself, then dropped her hand back to the battered kitchen table.

"I know. I know, El. You're not that scared girl anymore. And I'm so, so proud of you. But this --"

"I'm not her anymore. But when I think back to that time… I sort of am. Still her." She stared off into the distance.

"El --"

"Jane Ives, Subject 011, Eleven. I'm all of them. I'll always be all of them. When I think back to that time, I'm them again. And that's when they leak out. The others."

That sounded a bit… ominous, but he had long suspected as much.

"And when you're with me?"

"With you, I'm El. She's… the strongest one. The happiest." She focused back on Mike, her lips quirking into the tiny, trusting smile that she only ever directed at him. His heart lurched, like it always did. Always. He didn't deserve her.

"Okay. I'm not asking you to be… anything, anyone besides El."

She thought about that, then sighed.

"Mike... Hop took me to see Doctor Owens, years ago. Remember? The flashbacks were… very bad, then. It was too dangerous to talk to anyone else about it. Owens said the bad things that happened to me -- the trauma. He said my mind… turns away from those things. The pain, the fear. Avoidance, he called it. There are some things that are hard to think about. Even now."

"El… you're safe with me. You can say anything, be anyone, and it will be okay. I promise I won't freak out. I promise. And... I don't know, maybe it's good to talk about the bad things. So they don't, you know, fester."

She gave him a startled look -- deer in the headlights. After a moment, she relaxed again.

"Owens wanted me to try, but… it's hard."

"I know. I get it. And El… you know, the questions I have, this hypothesis, it's important… but nothing, absolutely nothing, is as important to me as you are. I want you to be okay. Wait, that's not right. I -- I need you to be happy. I'd do anything to make that happen. I'd do anything."

"Ew, Mike! You're so mushy," protested Holly absently, fingering the braid that El had woven into her blond locks.

"Mike…" El was shaking her head. She was about to protest that he already made her happy, he could tell. He hurried to get the words out.

"Maybe Jane Ives can't talk about missing her mama. Maybe Subject 011 can't talk about the abuse. And maybe Eleven can't talk about being hunted... But maybe El and I can help them?"

She stared at him. "How do you know what… ?"

Mike took a deep breath.

"Well, I was there, for some of it. The last part, anyway. But, when they leak out -- the other yous -- they say things. You say things, I mean. And I listen to every word you say. I always have, since the night we met. And sometimes, hearing how you were hurt… It's hard for me to hear that. It's like it's happening to me. Worse, actually. It makes me crazy. I get so angry -- furious -- and I've got nowhere to put it. But my anger doesn't help you to get past this. It doesn't. It's like... It's like I'm imposing my interpretation on your story. But it's your story! It's yours, not mine. So I'm just going to listen, and try to understand, and support you, while you tell your story. That's all. I want to hear you tell your own story, your own way, and I'll do anything I can to help. Because… because I love you."

And goddamn it, he did. He always had. Sometimes, it felt like it was the only thing he knew for sure. Mike loves El.

There was a long silence. Holly seemed to be holding her breath, eyes wide.

"Okay. But she… she might not sound like me," El muttered, her eyes downcast.

"Will she sound like me?" Holly blurted, startling Mike.

"Yes. Probably. A lot like you," said El, favoring her with a fond half-smile.

Holly rubbed her nose thoughtfully. "Well… if she's little, maybe she's lonely. And scared. Maybe… Maybe I could hold her hand? So she's not all alone?"

Mike was reminded once again that his little sister was, hands down, the most adorable person he knew.

El's eyes grew bright with tears, but she was still smiling at the eight-year-old. "Yes. She would like that."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long. Mike has a lot of demons, and he doesn't ask for help easily. It was a struggle not to make him seem too dark.


	6. Lost and Found

Eleven is lost.

How did she get here?

She ran from the monster, and hid.

She can't think about the monster.

She ran, and she hid in the dark, and she crawled, and she ran again. She kept running. And then, she couldn't run anymore. So she hid in the dark again.

And she woke up in… this place. Outside. Outside the lab. She has never, ever been outside the lab.

She's huddled in a small hollow place in the dirt. Is this where she hid, in the dark? With enough light to see, it's completely different. She sits up.

Brown towers, reaching for the green shadowy ceiling.

Trees. She knows what a tree is. But these are huge! Are they always this big? She starts to count them, but gives up. There are too many.

The trees all look the same, too. No, they all look different. But somehow, because there are so many, they all look the same. The floor here is not flat, and it's very messy. There are too many things to look at. So she listens instead.

This place is mostly quiet. Sort of like the lab. But it's a different kind of quiet. Something is whistling, high up in the trees, but she can't see what. Something else, tiny, whines as it flies past her face. The lab is always humming quietly, a low buzz she can hear. And she can always feel the matching ripples in her head.

Is the lab still humming? The monster must have wrecked -- No. She can't think about that.

She can only feel the long, slow wave. The wave that she can always feel, underneath the ripples. But there are no ripples, here.

And the smells! The picture book didn't say anything about the smell of trees, of wet leaves, of dirt. It's nothing like the pointy metal smell of the lab. It's more of a round smell. She can't decide if that means this new place has a good smell, or a bad one.

The smell of the… forest. That's the right word for this place.

The forest is so big! Bigger than any book said. She can't see to the edge of it. Is it bigger than the lab?

How will she find Papa again? Did she hide so well that Papa won't be able to find her?

She's being silly. Of course Papa will find her. But will the monster find her first?

No. She can't think about the monster. She stands up instead.

She's dirty, and tired. She's cold, too, but she's cold almost all the time. Her bed-room and the testing-rooms are always cold. The gown she's wearing is too thin to keep her warm. She didn't have time to grab anything else, not even her lion. She wishes she still had the Bath-suit, which is thick. But it's also very heavy, and she needed to run from the -- No.

But she can see the sun. She knows what the sun is. It's shining through the branches. It looks warm. And it's so bright on her face that she finds herself walking towards it. Her bare feet make scrunchy noises on the forest floor.

How did she avoid all of these rocks and branches in the dark, last night? Her feet hurt, and she has some scratches. So maybe she didn't.

She finds a place where it's a bit flatter, a bit easier to walk through the forest. A… path? Maybe it's a path. It's going in kind of the same direction she is. So she follows the path towards the warm sun.

An animal darts across the path in front of her. It's furry like a cat, but much smaller. Its tail is fluffy. It disappears into the forest in a blink. She hopes she didn't scare it. Maybe it's lost, too.

She's thinking about the tiny cat, and how warm and bright the sun is. So she doesn't notice that the smell of the forest is changing. Until suddenly, it's all she can think about, because her tummy is growling. She is hungry, so hungry, and the smell… it's oily and salty, somehow. It's nothing like the smell of what the men in white feed her. But her tummy seems very, very sure it's the smell of food. She walks faster.

It's getting brighter. Is the forest ending?

She steps out from under the trees.

The sun is hot on her skin, much warmer than she thought it would be. It's shouting at her. But not in an angry way. Just too many different ripples, all at once. The sun is too bright to look at, so she looks around instead.

She's in a new place. It's more open, more tidy. More green. Not as many things to count. But not as many places to hide from the -- No.

The sky is so blue.

She knows the sky is blue. But it's so, so blue, and it's everywhere. Behind everything she can see, it's blue.

In her book, there was a picture of a place like this. But the daytime sky in the book was the wrong blue. She knows that now. The next page was the same place, but at night. The nighttime sky had a pretty spray of stars. She wonders if the book got the stars wrong, too. 

This place isn't the forest, but this time she doesn't know what to call it. And she's so hungry she can't focus, can't try out any words. Because she thinks she knows where the food smell is coming from.

It's a… house? It's not a pretty house, not like in the books. But it has windows, and a door.

A man comes outside. A big man. Maybe he ate the food. She hopes he left some for her.

She follows him inside the house. Quietly, because she's not sure it's safe.

There are a lot of people in a big, bright room. The big man is in there. So she finds a smaller room. Nobody sees her.

It's not tidy, but this room is sort of like a testing-room. Metal, and tile, and machines. Is that scary? She's not sure, but she can't think. Right now, her angry tummy is leading her to… food? Warm, crispy… sticks. She takes a bite of one, and then she is stuffing handfuls into her mouth.

"Hey!"

The man sees her! She snatches the food -- run run run --

He's faster than she is. He catches her, grabs her by the shoulders, yelling something in her face. Grabbing means -- No. No no no no --

He stops, stares at her. "What in the hell?"

•

It turns out the man wants to cook for Eleven. He won't hurt her, he says. He's sorry he scared her. But why was he angry at first?

The other people have left. He's sent them away. She's alone with the man, in the big room full of tables. She sneaks a look at him while she eats.

The man's hair is shaved on top, like hers. But he has a lot of hair on the bottom of his face. She wonders how it got there.

She's so hungry. This strange food… it's what she smelled, in the forest. She can't seem to get it into her tummy fast enough.

Does this new man want to test her? Eleven's not sure. The man cleaned off some of the dirt. Papa always makes sure she is clean for the tests. The man helped her to take off the dirty gown. But all he did was slip this big yellow… shirt over her head. Why?

He only seems to have questions for her. She doesn't understand most of them.

Anyway, she's only supposed to talk to Papa. The men in white don't talk to her. And she never, ever talks to them. The men in white only bring her food, and help with the tests, and take her to different rooms.

Yesterday, there were a lot of men in white. More than ever before. It took them a long time to get the Bath ready for her. And to get her ready for the Bath. Papa said it was an important day, so maybe that was why. But it was very late, past dinnertime, when they finally lowered her --

All of them ran, screaming, from the lab, when the monster -- No.

The big man carefully takes her hand in his huge one. He shakes it, and lets go. She's not sure what it means. But he did let go.

Why did the man tell her his name? Eleven has only ever needed to know Papa's name, and her own. It's a strange idea, having to remember more names.

He touches her arm, by the number written there. She snatches her arm back, ready to run. Touching means tests. Touching means doing what Papa wants her to do. It means reaching out her hand in the darkness while it's feeding and -- No. No.

The man doesn't try touching her again. Why did he do it the first time?

He's asking for her name. He doesn't seem to understand that the 011 on her wrist is already the answer. He asks what the number is for. It's the same question as the first one. She has to explain. Because she doesn't want him to take the food away. She is Eleven, because Eleven is her.

Why all the questions? It's a puzzle. But she's used to not knowing the reasons for things. She's just Eleven, just a test subject. Maybe the man will tell her what he really wants later. After she finishes eating?

The questions seem to be over. The man lets her go back to eating.

Her tummy isn't as angry as before. A thought pops into her head as she chews. This man isn't like Papa. Papa never, ever stops. He never stops until he gets all the answers he wants. 

And the man did make her food. And he did say "Don't worry. It's okay," in his rumbly, blurry voice. And he did make an odd kind of face where his eyes crinkled. A gentle face. But hairy.

Benny. That's the man's name. She'll try to remember.

Benny rumbles something about coming back, and leaves her alone to eat.

•

Her tummy is nearly full now. She can think about other things. Not just food. She looks around the room.

The machine that blows air is bad. It's shaking and rattling. But the noise isn't what bothers her.

The machine uses wires. Eleven knows about wires. The men in white always put a net of wires on her head, for the tests. The wires listen to the ripples of her power. Papa has a pen machine that draws her ripples on paper.

And she can listen, too. She can feel the ripples, in her head. And this air machine's messy, pointy ripples are spilling everywhere. It's getting harder to feel anything else.

Now that her tummy is full, she can focus. She looks at the air machine and then she Looks at it and --

Stops it. No more bad ripples.

She can think now. She knows why she was so hungry. She used too much power yesterday. Much, much more than she ever has before. Because she reached out to the -- and then tore open the world trying to get away from its horrible -- and then -- oh no it's -- No.

She can't think about it after all.

She gets up to see what Benny is doing instead.

•

Later, Benny shows her what he does to make food. There are a lot of machines. A lot of hot metal. A lot of rules, for staying safe around hot metal. She doesn't understand all of it. But she knows about rules.

One thing is clear. What she thought was a testing-room is really the cooking-room. Maybe there won't be any testing after all.

Benny says something that startles her. I scream? Benny is going to scream? Has he seen the -- ? Does she need to run?

It turns out that I Scream means something sweet and cold and good. Words are hard. But she likes the I Scream.

Another new word: Smile. That one is easy, because Benny makes the crinkly face again, to show her. So she does it too. But hers isn't hairy.

Maybe words aren't always so hard.

Someone is outside. Who? Should she run? She stares at Benny, and he understands. He sees her fear.

Benny rumbles something about sending the person away.

The lady at the front door smiles at Benny. Eleven can see them from where she is, in the cooking-room. They're talking quietly. Maybe it's okay.

The lady follows Benny in, pulls out something black and then --

No. No no no no no --

Run run run -- 

There are two men at the back door and they have the killing machines too and she slides to a stop and Looks at them and breaks them and runs out the door and runs and runs and runs --

Back to the forest. To hide in the dark.

•

She hopes Papa finds her soon, before the bad people do. She doesn't like the dark. The blue, blue sky turned black when she wasn't looking. And cold water is falling from the black sky now.

Bad people are chasing her. Trying to catch her. Reaching. Killing. Killing the nice -- No.

Rain. That's the right word.

She hates the rain.

•

She's huddled in the forest when she hears voices. She's by a tree, in a hollow place. It might even be the same one as last time. In the rain, in the dark, she can't be sure. But it doesn't matter. The sky is rumbling and flashing. She's very, very cold.

A small person. Like her? She looks closer. No. The person's hair is dark and wavy, not shaved.

His hair. He's a… boy. All of them are. Three boys. She can see them, because they have lights. But they can't see her, in the dark, because they have lights.

The boys have a lot of clothes on, even on their feet. All she's wearing is the yellow shirt.

She can't stay here. The cold rain isn't stopping. She can't go back to the lab, in case the monster -- No. And anyway, she's lost.

The boys don't look like they're lost.

What else is there to do? Does it even matter what she does?

She steps out. Into their lights, so they can see her.

Two of them look scared, like they're not sure what she is. Maybe they've never seen a girl? Their eyes dart around like the tiny cat did, in the forest. She wishes they would stop shining their lights in her face.

"Who the hell are you? What are you doing out here?" asks the one with dark skin.

"Aren't you cold?" says the one with curly hair.

She waits for them to do… whatever they're going to do.

But the boy in the middle… isn't scared. His eyes are very dark. He looks at her, only at her. Like he wants to see into her head. Like he's trying to listen to the ripples of her thoughts.

And his dark eyes widen. Like he understands.

She's so cold, and so wet. She's shivering. The boy takes off his jacket. He puts it over her shoulders. And then, he shines his light in his own face. So she can see him better?

"Don't worry. We're going to help you," he tells her.

And something in his face catches her eye. Something she's seen before.

All three boys are talking, about her, but she's not listening. She's looking at his face.

Stars.

He has a spray of tiny dots across his face, like the stars in the night sky of her book.

•

The wheel machine that the boy calls a bike is very fast, but wet. She can feel water splashing against her legs. But she's already more wet than she's ever been. Or at least that's how it feels. She focuses on staying away from the spinny parts. And not falling off when the bike tips, and the ground pulls at her.

The storm is getting stronger, closer. She can feel its ripples pulling at her, too.

•

The house they take her to looks like it's from her book. Maybe it's pretty in the daytime, with no storm. In this messy brown room at the bottom of the house, she is finally out of the rain. She sits on a big squishy chair. But she's still so, so cold.

The questions are different from last time. But she still doesn't understand most of them. And she's not really listening, or thinking about words right now.

The storm roars, very close this time. Loud noises mean -- No. There are sun-bright flashes outside. Matching with the flashes, ripples yank at her mind. Shockingly strong ripples, just like -- No. No. She squeezes her eyes shut, shivering.

"Here. These are clean. Okay?" What? The boy with the stars is handing her something. Oh. Dry clothes. They smell like… soap? They're very soft and warm. She rubs them against her cheek for a moment. It makes her think of something… nice. She's thinking of the tiny cat's fluffy tail, instead of the storm. She stands up and starts to take off the soaked yellow shirt.

The boys are suddenly scared. They spin around to look at the other side of the room, shouting. But there's nothing there.

She's made a mistake. But she doesn't know what. The boy with the stars says she needs to use the bathroom. But she already did that, at Benny's -- oh. To put the clothes on? The boy's eyes tell her this is important.

Eleven is often naked. Most of the time, she just wears a thin gown. She never thinks about it. This is a new thing. But she doesn't want the boys to be scared. Maybe she really is the first girl they've seen.

The boy shows her where the bathroom is. He tries to close the door. The door to this tiny room. A closed door means -- No. She grabs the door, holds it in place.

"You don't want it closed?" He seems surprised, not angry.

How to explain, about being trapped in a -- "No."

"Oh, so you can speak!" He leaves a space, so the door isn't shut all the way. "Is that better?"

He isn't going to make her explain? "…Yes."

The boy nods his head, and leaves her alone.

She's only supposed to talk to Papa. But… this boy is trying to help her. Just like he said. He could see she was lost. Benny saw it, too. But she doesn't want to think about Benny.

Eleven takes off the soaked yellow shirt. There's a towel here, so she wipes off her skin. She looks at the two things the boy gave her. One is another shirt, smaller but thicker. The other is a… shirt for her legs? She can't think of the word. She wriggles into both.

She feels better almost right away. So warm and dry. She's usually cold. Warm is so much better.

•

The boy with the stars understands hiding. When she comes out, he's already building a special hiding place for her. A blanket fort, he calls it. He must be very smart, to have thought of it.

He makes it very cozy for her. So much better than her hollow in the woods. She feels safer, looking out from inside it. She likes the fort.

The other boys are leaving. They don't live here. Only the boy with the stars does.

He's asking for her name. It's easier to just show him.

"Is that real?" Why does everyone want to touch the writing on her arm? Touching means -- No. She yanks her arm away.

"Sorry. I've just never seen a kid with a tattoo before." He does an eye-crinkle smile. He has… gentle eyes. She relaxes again.

So, other people don't have their names on their arms? They just have to remember. Okay.

She makes him understand that she is Eleven. His eyebrows come together for a second. She notices that his hair is dripping wet. Because he gave her his jacket, in the rain. She's warm and dry now, but he's still soaked.

He made sure she was okay, first.

"Eleven. Okay. Well, my name's Mike -- short for Michael. Maybe we can call you El -- short for Eleven?"

She stares at him. He's waiting. What is he waiting for? Is he asking her if it's okay to call her that?

She thinks about it. El. It's not a number. It's more like a letter. She knows her letters. L is for Lion. Maybe it would be nice to be someone else. Even if it means remembering a new name. She nods to tell the boy it's okay for him to call her El.

Nobody ever asks Eleven if something is okay. That's not true. Papa asks her. But it's different. If she ever says no, Papa gets mad. He presses his lips together, and nods in the angry way. And tells the men in white to take her to -- No.

Mike. The boy's name is Mike. She won't forget.

"Um, well, okay. Night, El," he says, pulling the blanket into place.

"Night, Mike," she replies, because she's sure that's the right thing. And because… because she wants to. She's not supposed to. But maybe it wouldn't be so bad to talk to Mike some more, tomorrow.

Mike turns off some lights, and then he's gone up the stairs, too.

•

She's lying on top of the blankets, just in case. Just in case they find her, and she has to run again. She misses her lion. She's shivering, but she's not cold anymore.

She's scared. Of the storm, of being lost, of being found, of what's happened, of what's going to happen next. Mostly, she's scared of the things she can't think of.

Will Papa find her here? Will he be angry? What if the monster… she can't think about the monster. What if the bad people find her? Like they found her at Benny's food house? Benny was nice, and they --

What will happen to these boys? To Mike? Mike made her a fort.

The clearest thought of all comes as Eleven closes her eyes. It's a new thing, and she's not sure what it means. But it's a very clear thought. And it makes her feel less scared, somehow.

She will not let anything happen to Mike.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I felt it was important to show that Eleven hadn't yet realised that Brenner is her enemy. She had, as yet, no external frame of reference to see that he was abusing her horrendously -- and maybe that's the saddest part.


	7. Empathy

Something Max said had really set him off.

Well, to be fair, everything she said to him these days set him off. Lucas was pretty sure it was deliberate.

In the silence of his room, with Erica out shopping, or whatever the hell it was she did with her annoying friends, he could think. He stared at the ceiling above his bed. He was thinking, not brooding about his ex, though. There was a difference!

Lucas knew Max. He figured he knew her better than anyone, even El. Now, it was true that the two girls were partners in crime, and had been since… well, since The Apology. They were best friends now, inseparable.

Which Lucas was a bit ambivalent about, to be honest. It meant that Max never abandoned the friend group, not even when she and Lucas were on the outs. She would never give up El. And El would never give up Mike, and Mike… anyway, yeah. It was not optimal to have your ex in your face all the time, but life sucked sometimes and Lucas could deal with it.

Anyway, El… didn't quite get some things. Mostly social interactions. Oh sure, her language skills were great nowadays. But she still had trouble figuring out what other people were feeling, and why. Sometimes, she would just sort of, well, tune out of a situation. Lucas knew what that meant. They all did, by now. She would ask Mike about it later. Only Mike. And Mike, with endless patience, would explain it to her.

So there were things about Max that, despite being her best friend, El probably didn't understand. Especially things that Mike couldn't properly explain -- because he and Max hadn't been close, at first. It was much better now, but Max could still be a bit… prickly.

Yeah, so all in all, Lucas felt fairly confident in his Max-related expertise -- if anyone besides Max herself could claim to possess such a thing.

And prickly was exactly how she was with him, now. Lucas was sure she was needling him deliberately. All the freaking time. He drummed his fingers against the headboard.

The thing was, she had been the one to dump him, not the other way around. Just like the last time. And it had hurt! In typical Max fashion, she hadn't shared her reasoning, only rolling her eyes at his obtuseness. But Lucas could guess.

Maybe she had wanted him to argue with her, to fight back. To fight for her, the way nobody else ever had.

Lucas knew that Max had some demons. Among other things, she struggled with feelings of alienation. That part wasn't hard to figure out, anyway. She had been forced to adapt to the relentless ordinariness of Indiana -- well, ordinary except for all the crazy supernatural stuff. She had been forced to adapt to never seeing her real father. She had been forced to adapt to having an abusive stepfather, and a borderline homicidal stepbrother. And to a mother whose focus was simple survival, who had little affection to spare.

She had been forced to confront the incontrovertible fact that nobody was on her side. It had made her adopt a tough, cynical persona. Armour, against the world.

Which Lucas had seen past. Not right away, though. Her tolerance for bullshit was zero. He had gone to some lengths to prove himself to her first, letting her in on all of the Party's secrets. And when she had finally turned that thousand-watt smile in his direction… wow.

Maybe she was stung that, after everything, after she took what might have been the biggest chance of her life, and opened up to him, he still hadn't fought to keep her. 

Yeah, okay. Maybe that had been a mistake. But he couldn't really blame himself. Lucas was a pragmatic guy -- and Max knew it. If Max told him it was over, who was he to tell her she was wrong? 

Moreover, his dad had drilled it into him, with no room for uncertainty. Lucas could hear that voice, firm and uncompromising. You respect your woman. Do you respect your mother? You sure as hell better! Well, respecting your woman was the same. Damn. Thing.

Because, if you don't, if you don't respect your woman… you can't respect yourself. And if you can't respect yourself, you're not a man. You're nothing.

And then, you've lost the war before firing the first shot! As a black man, it's not enough to just be good. It's nowhere near enough. They are gunning for you. They are waiting for you to screw up. You can't just be good, son. They have to look up to you. You have to be the best.

Lucas was not the best, decidedly not. But he was trying. And that meant he had to take Max at her word, when she told him it was over.

Anyway, his relationship with Max was ancient history. Or maybe not ancient, but definitely previous-chapter material. The Party had a crisis to deal with.

He flipped his pillow over to the cooler side.

What had really got him thinking was Max's comment about electromagnetism. And dammit, he berated himself, you should have been the one to figure that out, mister Advanced Placement in science. Idiot.

Max was 100% right that El's powers were, in a fundamental way, electromagnetic. The evidence had been right in front of him. Electric lights went nuts when she focused her abilities. He had seen it with his own idiot eyes, and hadn't even thought about it. It meant, in theory at least, that she was generating a moving electromagnetic field. The field could then induce a current in nearby electrical wires. And that would make all the lights on that circuit… do things.

Actually, if he was being logical, the current should be induced in anything nearby that was conductive. Gold, silver, even steel. But long runs of copper, like house wiring, would be affected the most. It seemed like a side-effect of her powers, though. Was she even aware she was doing it?

He slapped his forehead. Double idiot! He had witnessed that, too! She had been able to change the direction of all their compass needles, back in '83. Continuously, for over an hour. Very, very deliberately.

Yeah, that. Ahem. He had called her… certain things for doing that. A traitor. A monster. He felt a rush of shame. With the benefit of hindsight, he knew had been wrong not to trust her. But there was no way to change the past.

So, what were the facts?

El could consciously generate and manipulate electromagnetic fields. Fact.

She could generate fields at least as strong as the Earth's own geomagnetic field, say half a gauss. Fact.

By manipulating a field, she could induce at least enough current to overwhelm a standard 15-amp AC power circuit. Fact.

Whoa there, those were the first points resembling solid data. Now he was getting somewhere!

Whoa. Wait a minute. Steel was electrically conductive -- and ferromagnetic, too. Which meant it could be moved, using magnetic fields. Like the big electromagnet at the scrap yard. And lots of things were made of steel. Like, say…

Like, say, a van. A Hawkins Power and Light van, gliding impossibly through the air over his head. Holy shit. How much power would that take?

Why hadn't he thought about this stuff before now? Okay, fine, he was a pragmatic guy, but what was up with just leaving questions unanswered, all these years? It was like he had labeled a box "Caution -- Supernatural Stuff" and very carefully placed El's powers in it, taping it shut afterwards. It was nuts! For a science nerd, it was crazy.

Well…

Um, no. Actually, it wasn't crazy.

El was his friend. She was a good person.

No, she was a great person. She had been treated like worse than shit -- by that Brenner asshole, among others -- but she never gave up. Nobody would have blamed her. But that wasn't El. She still kept going, every day, no matter how badly the world could treat someone who was different.

She still looked at the world with wonder in her eyes, still loved her friends unconditionally. She was fiercely, almost terrifyingly loyal. Lucas knew, knew for certain, that she would give up her life for his. Because she already had, once. The walls of his bedroom faded, replaced by the blackboards of Mr Clarke's science classroom.

She stared at each of them in turn. Her heartbroken eyes begged forgiveness. She whispered her goodbye. Defeated, dying, she turned back to the monster, and sent it to hell.

Lucas swiped at his watery eyes. Must be dusty in here.

El wasn't just some specimen for him to study, to dryly dissect, so he could catalogue her abilities. She had already lived through that. Thanks to that Brenner fuck, her entire childhood had been that.

And she had saved his life. Lucas owed her. At the very least, he figured he owed her some empathy -- an attempt at picturing things from her perspective. Like he tried to do for Max.

So. If she could manipulate electromagnetic fields, she must be able to perceive them, too, right? Logically? Okay. Lucas wondered what that would be like. He tried to put himself in El's scuffed Converse sneakers. What would his friend experience?

Sounds, or maybe colours, that nobody else could perceive, maybe. Or a magnetic pull, somewhere behind her eyes? Or something else entirely. He would have to point to an EM source… and ask her.

So what were some EM sources nearby?

Well, microwave ovens. Um, radios? Like Citizens' Band, or hey, like Hopper's police radio! Or, wait a minute, think bigger... Think bigger!

He surged off the bed and threw open his closet door. Where the hell was it? Lucas dug frantically through a box of old books until he found what he needed. Mr Clarke's Gazetteer of radio towers! Lucas felt a bit guilty about having kept it. He had been studying, sort of, for his HAM radio licence… until high school intervened.

Out of the blue, Lucas realized that he missed Mr Clarke. Oh, he still saw him around town every once in a while, but it wasn't the same. Being in that classroom every day, sitting right up front with his friends, soaking up the man's knowledge -- no, more than that. Way more than just that. Soaking up his enthusiasm. His dedication. His respect, for the material he taught... and for everyone in that classroom.

His mentorship. Lucas missed that. The teachers at Hawkins High were okay… but they weren't Mr Clarke.

Anyway. Transmission towers. He returned his attention to the book.

The WIPB tower south of Muncie seemed to be closest. Sure, there were higher power transmitters in Fort Wayne and Indianapolis. And Cincinnati, for that matter -- except WKRP was, sadly, fictional. The way Lucas saw it, though, better to keep it simple. Signal attenuation applied to everything, but if El couldn't even detect the closest signal, say 20 miles away, none of it mattered.

WIPB was the local PBS Television affiliate. So, the question became a very prosaic one: could El pick up UHF channel 49? And if so, what exactly was that like for her? Image, sound, static, or what?

He grinned at the thought of El wearing rabbit-ear antennas on her head, Mike frantically twisting them this way and that to pull in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

Okay. He felt better now. Now, he had a plan.

Lucas liked prosaic questions: keep it simple, eliminate all the variables you can.

His grin faded. Unfortunately, that approach just didn't work with "matters of the heart," as his dad would put it.

Take his most recent conquest, for example. Samantha. A great girl. Fantastic girl. Everyone called her Sam. Everyone, that is, except Dustin, who had dubbed her "Xam, the anti-Max." Which was right up there with the most irritating things Dustin had ever said.

The dark brunette was cheerful, quiet and straightforward. So easy to get along with, unlike some other people. Effortless. He loved that about Sam. He really did.

He hated that about her.

Shit. Fuck you, Dustin. Why did everything have to be so complicated?

Lucas sighed, then frowned. Something wasn't right. Something else.

He didn't always trust his gut, but today it felt like his thoughts were spinning. Orbiting around something… important.

Max… Respect… Mr Clarke... El… Empathy…

The clock on his nightstand clicked over to twelve noon.

Brenner... Twelve.

He sat bolt upright. If Hypothesis C was correct, and Brenner was in town, he wasn't just a vague threat. Brenner only had power if he could compel someone else to do his dirty work. If it was him behind the Echo, he had to be abusing someone. Another telekinetic. Probably a kid. Just like El had been.

If Lucas owed El his life, and he was trying to be the best person he could… well. He owed it to her -- to himself -- to put a stop to that child abuse, if he could. There was really no question about it. Stand by and allow another kid to be abused, like what El went through? No way. Not happening.

The Ranger reached for the phone.

"Hawkins police." It was a woman's voice, her tone resigned.

"Hi, uh, Flo? It's Flo, right?" Lucas had met the Hawkins PD secretary once or twice.

"Speaking. Do you have an emergency?"

"Oh, uh, no. This is Lucas Sinclair. Can you put me through to Steve? Officer Harrington, I mean."

"Sinclair? You're one of his… protégés, aren't you. Okay, dear, but listen. Trainees aren't supposed to be taking personal calls, so try to keep it short and sweet. The Chief's in one of his moods. Hold on."

Lucas had time to feel vaguely nauseated at being known as a "Harrington protégé" before that trademark cheerful-but-aloof voice came on the line.

"Yello."

"Steve, it's Lucas. Listen carefully. Remember who we were talking about yesterday? Our old friend, who might be visiting?" He hoped Steve would catch the hint. There was no telling who could be listening.

"Old friend…? Oh, you mean Br-- Brrrrad. Uh, Brad Hamilton, sure." He could almost hear Steve's conspiratorial wink, after nearly blurting out the name. Jesus.

"Yeah, well, I need you to figure out whether 'Brad' might already be in town -- you know, renting a place. A big place. A place with enough room for his… his niece. She's twelve, remember? And she needs lots of room. For her bath. And, uh, the bodyguards. Do you get it?" Please get it…

"Whoa. Hang on there, shithead. How the hell am I supposed to figure out --"

"How should I know? You're the cop, not me!"

Steve paused, chastened. "Crap… yeah. Okay, I'll ask Hop --"

"No, no, no! Listen. This has to be undercover. Hopper… he might not agree with our priorities. He hates Brad. If he finds out about this, he's going after Brad. No matter what, we have to get the niece out safely first. If I'm right, and they're in town, Brad is secondary. Agreed?"

"Huh. I didn't think of that. Poor kid. Okay, yeah, mum's the word. Mum is the word... You know, I bet the Chamber of Commerce has a list of all the rental spaces in town. They might know about recent occupancies, shit like that…"

"Awesome. But be careful. We just need information at this point. Oh, and you probably want to check the south side first, near Mirkwood."

"All right, all right, leave the police work to the professional, dipshit. I've got this," Steve said briskly.

"Whatever you say. Anyway, I have to get going. Gotta go see a girl about an antenna."

"Ha ha, right, yeah, antenna. Wait, what?"

"Later, dude."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the Just-Trying-to-Help Dept.:  
> WKRP In Cincinnati was a TV comedy from the early '80s.  
> Brad Hamilton was a character from the 1982 movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who wanted to see this continue!


	8. Arrivals

Max kicked her skateboard into her hand and knocked at the front door. She liked El's house, both because it was much closer than the cabin had been, and because the front verandah reminded her of… well, it didn't matter. A house in California.

Mike let her in, and handed her a Coke without asking. He looked tired, his typical button-down style rumpled and casual for once.

"Thanks. Where's El?"

"She's having a nap upstairs. I guess it's become a habit, the last few weeks. But she's getting stronger every day."

"Oh. What about the others?"

Mike rolled his eyes. "Lucas went to get a discount hamburger from Dustin, and they're both coming here after his shift. Will doesn't get off work until five, I think."

That left the two of them alone. Awkward. Max couldn't remember the last time she had spent more than a few minutes alone with Mike. They both sat at the battered kitchen table.

"So have you come up with anything?" It was a bit too abrupt, but somebody had to kick-start the conversation.

Mike tilted his head ambivalently. "Well, I'm trying to map out all of El's uses of her powers on a timeline. Not the trivial stuff, but the times she did things that were really big and obvious."

"A nosebleed graph."

He winced. "Not how I would put it, but yeah. Oh, and I'm trying to estimate the power level for each event. I'm hoping we can see a pattern with the intervals to the lab explosion, so getting accurate dates and times is essential."

He showed her a stack of fanfold computer paper. "I plugged everything I could remember into a computer program called Excel. I got it to spit out this chart, but of course there's a lot of guesswork…"

She flipped through the folded-up graph with its printed peaks and valleys, impressed despite herself. The horizontal axis -- time -- started back in 1983. She paused, frowning. Something about that, about a five-year history of peril, where the boundary between life and death had been guarded only by her best friend's powers, was… disturbing. "I didn't even know there was a way to do this. Huh."

"Yeah, well, my dad always has to have the latest and greatest. I was up most of the night figuring it out. I wound up putting all the intervals in units of days, and fractions of days. It was too messy any other way."

Her heart continued to sink. Something wasn't right. "Wait a minute. What about the ghost thing?"

"Well, I'm assuming that's just a side effect of the energy release --"

The feeling of foreboding gave way to anger. "No. You said, 'Oh Max, don't be silly! For all we know, the Echo could be happening at the lab every night!' Now you're looking at specific intervals. You haven't even been inside that building yet! Did you say that just to shut me up?"

"What? No! Listen, Max, you and I may have had our differences, but I do know you're not stupid."

"Stop trying to butter me up, Loverboy, and spill. What's going on with the Hypothesis? El's not out of the woods yet, and we can't let our guard down!"

"But that's just it, she is! Okay, fine, we won't know for sure until we get into the lab. But El's nightmares got worse for a month, and then, after the Echo, they got better. The theory is that this Echo was a one-off."

"That's not good enough! You're just guessing!"

"I'm going with the information we have! Jesus, Max, do you really think I want to put her in danger? I lost her once, and I'm not going to let it happen again!"

Did he not understand? They were fumbling around in the dark! Meanwhile, Brenner was still out there somewhere. Even if Hypothesis C was wrong, even if he wasn't actually in Hawkins, El still wasn't safe. Maybe she never would be… The idea made her even more furious.

"Oh my god, Mike! I get it, okay? You love her! And you got hurt. And you're afraid of getting hurt again. You, you, you! Don't you see how selfish you're being?"

"Bullshit! Max, I would do anything for El. Anything. Don't tell me I'm only thinking of myself. I've never loved anyone else like --"

"Neither have I!" she roared at his stupid face.

"…What?" said Mike, much more quietly. He glanced at the stairs leading up to the bedrooms.

Max caught her breath. Why in the world did she say that? How did she let Wheeler get under her skin like this? She raised her chin. Actually, she had meant to say that all along. Mike needed to hear it.

"You're not the only one who cares about her! I've never had a… a best friend before. Not like this. I'm… not great with people, okay?"

Okay, that was a bit more brutally honest than it needed to be. What was with her today?

Mike took a breath to say, "Tell me about it." She could see the words on his lips. He was dying to say it. It was expected, normal. She had the counterattack all queued up, ready to go. But instead, he just… stopped. He took a deep breath, and gave her a strange look. A look that freaked her out. It was kind, and almost… fond?

"Remember when you thought I hated you?"

What the hell? "Thought? You did hate me! You were such an asshole… Why are we even talking about this?"

"I know I was. But I didn't hate you, Max. I mean, I convinced myself I did, yeah. But, let's be honest. If I had really hated you, I would have ignored you completely."

Any other day, she would have shrugged this off, told him to forget it, it's cool, water under the bridge. Today, though…

"And that makes it okay? I tried. I really, really tried, and you kept blowing me off! And the other three let you get away with it! You could be the world's biggest douchebag, and they would just exchange this weird little worried look, and defer to you anyway! I honestly thought they made you the leader just because they were scared shitless of you."

"Max, here's the thing. I thought you were… smart. Interesting. Cool as hell, actually. I liked you… and then I hated myself for it. It felt like a betrayal. Like you were taking El's place."

"I wasn't trying to do that! How could I? I didn't even know she existed until you said her name by accident!"

"I know. But if you did take her place... that would mean she really wasn't coming back. And I... I couldn't accept that. So I guess I had to push back, hard, against that feeling. Against you."

"I know, you took it out on me, like a little --"

"And then, when El finally did come back… she must have felt sort of the same way about you being part of the group. Like you kind of took her place. She was downright rude, remember?"

"Yeah, well, El apologized --"

"I know. I asked her to."

"You -- you what?" This was news. And he wasn't gloating about the revelation. He seemed… earnest?

"I saw how you were with Lucas. How you… made each other better, kind of? Plus, you skated into a supernatural war zone and didn't bat an eye. You were awesome, Max. You helped us, even though you didn't have to, even though we hadn't treated you very well. And we needed you, even if we didn't know it. We couldn't have closed the Gate without your help."

"You got that right," she muttered.

"And once El was back, I could finally relax and recognize all of it. I… saw what an idiot I had been. So, I explained things to her. That you were cool, and nice. That you helped us. That you really, really wanted to be her friend, if she would let you. Um, and that you liked Lucas… not me."

Her mind came to a screeching halt. She struggled to comprehend what Mike was saying.

"Wait, I'm sorry, what? You're saying Eleven… the love of your life, the other half of the inseparable duo Mike-and-El… Jane Hopper was jealous? Of me?"

"Until I explained it, sure. She didn't really get that kind of thing back then."

She blinked. El had come such a long way that Max sometimes forgot just how isolated, how socially immature, she had been at first. You'd have to be, to fail to understand that Mike Wheeler was, almost literally, crazy about you, and that the idea of him so much as looking at another girl was beyond ludicrous. Once Mike had explained it to her, El had probably felt horribly ashamed about fucking up something as basic as that, and then taking it out on Max. It explained certain things.

Anyway, this would be where she expressed nausea at the idea of romance between her and Mike Wheeler. It was expected. But… today was seemingly not the day for that. Mike was, for some reason, laying all his cards on the table. He had jettisoned their usual snarky dynamic, in favour of... this. Whatever this was. Honesty? Acceptance? She felt entirely rudderless. So, she stopped, and pinpointed the real question she needed to ask.

"Mike -- why are you telling me all this now? It's four years too late."

Mike spread his arms in a gesture that was somewhere between a shrug and a hug. "To show you that we're both on the same side! That we're not rivals for El's attention, to be blunt. We never were. That we need to work together to figure out this Echo thing, instead of bickering. To make sure we get it right. And also… to tell you that I love my friends, Max. And you're one of them. Even when you get on my last nerve, you're still my Zoomer."

She was speechless. Who was this guy, and what had he done with Mike? When had Wheeler become so… open? It must have been written all over her face, because he answered her unasked question.

"El and I… we make each other better, too." He cocked an eyebrow at her, and waited. He seemed very still, so unlike his usual twitchiness. Was he holding his breath?

She wanted to stay mad at him. She really did, the smug asshole. But he had just revealed the depth of his feelings. And he was trying, in his typically inept way, to fix things.

The thing was, he had asked her a question, without actually asking it. It was impertinent, it wasn't any of his business, and she wasn't even sure she could explain it… but dammit, Mike loved his friends. She couldn't deny that. And Max now saw, with perfect clarity, that he just wanted the best for them. For her. It was trite as hell, and it was also true.

Well, fuck. If Mike Wheeler, of all people, could transcend the script, and be mature about his feelings…

Challenge accepted.

"Mike… I like you too, okay. Ugh, love. There, I said it. You're smart and, um, weirdly idealistic, and it's mostly pretty cool to be your friend."

He smiled, but continued to watch her evenly. That first part was easy. Too easy. Time to level up. She sighed and went on. "The reason I tried so hard back then was, well, new town, new school… new me. I had to start over, reinvent myself. I was always the kid who didn't really fit in anywhere. A lost puzzle piece, you know? That's what it was like in California. And with you guys, I felt like maybe, I finally had a shot..."

It was all coming out in a rush. Max hesitated, but she was committed. She couldn't punk out now.

"...Especially with you. In some ways, you reminded me of… well, of myself. You were... I dunno, damaged, I guess? Like me. I guess I saw you as the boss battle in a video game. You know, the kind where the boss is like a mirror image of the player? A doppelganger.

"But, okay, the story with Lucas and me… Yeah, we make each other better. You didn't imagine it. But it's complicated. You can't just --"

She stopped. There were unmistakable sounds of arguing coming from the front porch.

"-- sent him in alone? Are you out of your mind?"

"Dustin, chill out. He's a cop. Besides, it's not like he's going to kick down any doors. It's just research!"

"God damn it, Lucas."

"Seriously? What are you gonna do, shield him with your body?"

"If necessary, yes! If I have to take a bullet for him --" The rest was indistinct.

Mike threw open the door to Lucas rolling his eyes, fist raised to knock. He looked faintly ridiculous in a crimson Ball State golf shirt and Bermuda shorts. Dustin was racing off down the street on his bike.

"What was all that about?" Mike wanted to know.

Lucas hesitated, then saw Max in the hallway and looked briefly surprised before glancing away. "Uh, nothing. You know Dustin…"

Mike crossed his arms. He wasn't buying it.

This was going to take all day. Max figured it was up to her. Nobody could transcend the script like she could. Wheeler only wished he had her mad skills.

She reached past Mike and pulled a wide-eyed Lucas into the house.

"Mike, since we're being honest today, we both owe you an apology. Because I'm guessing that little display had to do with Hypothesis C. Right, Lucas?"

•

So they told him. He wasn't pleased.

"Wait, so I wasn't privy to this Hypothesis C -- which is most likely bullshit, by the way -- because you were all afraid I would fly into a murderous rage at the mention of the name? Seriously?"

"Mike, say his name. Just say it," suggested Lucas.

"What? Okay, fine. Brenner." Max recoiled slightly at Mike's sudden dead expression.

"Yeah, see, this is what we're taking about. This," said Lucas, poking at Mike's locked jaw muscles. Mike batted away his hand.

Lucas winced and went on. "Anyway, Steve -- and Dustin, I guess -- should be able to figure out if it's even possible that Brenner's circus is in town."

Mike didn't respond, staring at the table.

"Listen, I get it, Mike. I've never even met the guy, and I want to hurt him, too," Max offered.

"I don't want to hurt him, Max. This isn't a revenge fantasy. I want him to not exist anymore." He was matter-of-fact about it, which made his words seem, if anything, worse.

There didn't seem to be much to say to that. The silence stretched.

Mike stirred from his brooding and tapped the stacked printout in front of him.

"Anyway, getting back to Hypothesis A, I've worked up a preliminary timeline for El's uses of her powers. I'm hoping having accurate timings will allow us to predict if and when another Echo is going to happen. I'm going to need everyone to double-check my assumptions."

"Can do! So, what fresh ideas do you have, Max?" Lucas inquired, a bit too hastily. He was expecting her not to have anything, so he could then segue into whatever he had come up with. Lucas could be a bit of an asshole sometimes, especially when he thought he was being smooth.

"I called a geologist and got plans for a simple mechanical seismograph. We're going to build it and set it up next to the foundation of the lab, tonight," she stated flatly, pulling out the handwritten diagram.

Lucas' eyes looked like they were going to bug out of his head. Served him right.

Mike's face slowly split into a grin. "That's… actually a fantastic idea. We'll be able to detect any more explosions, from outside the building. Brilliant!"

They both turned to look at Lucas, who quickly regained his composure.

"Uh, well, I thought it would be helpful to understand how, exactly, El perceives the electromagnetic realm. We think manipulating fields is the mechanism behind her powers. If we can see the world through her eyes, that might give us some clues. Plus, it will show her we're all in this together. You know, that we care about her point of view. Uh, so anyway, I've got a list of EM sources -- radio towers -- along with their compass headings. We point, and ask her what she sees. Not to map the towers, but to map her senses." Lucas glanced nervously at Max, but frankly, it sounded pretty reasonable.

Mike raised his eyebrows in suprise. "That's a good idea, too. We'll have to keep it low-key, so it's not too much like an interrogation. But yeah! Huh."

"Yeah, didn't Dustin say something about migratory birds, how they navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field? I wasn't listening to the nerdy details, but maybe it's not completely crazy," Max mused.

Mike was glancing back and forth between Max and Lucas with a thoughtful expression, which slowly morphed into a knowing smile.

Max could feel her cheeks burning, and her stomach felt jumpy. Okay, fine, Lucas' talk of volcanoes and geysers had given her the idea for the seismograph. So what? She was transcending the script! Wheeler could be such a pain in the ass sometimes.

"Okay you two, we can wait for the others before we go over the timeline, but maybe we should get a head start on the seismometer --" Mike stopped, his mouth open.

The papers were… floating… above the table. Wait, the table itself was floating above the kitchen tiles. So were the chairs they occupied, she realized with a lurch. A clattering from the cabinets meant…

Everything was floating. What?

The colour drained out of Mike's face and he launched himself toward the stairs, shouting, "El!"

Just then, the screaming started. It was bloodcurdling. Eleven's voice echoed through the house, choked with terror and pain. She shrieked the same two words, over and over.

"No more!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Arrivals" because Mike and Max are rivals, in a way. Heh.
> 
> I found this chapter hard to write. Max has a lot of defences, so I tried to open her up a little.
> 
> Why did I choose to write from the POV of a character whose voice doesn't come naturally to me? Because fuck you, challenge accepted, that's why.
> 
> Maybe she's closer to my heart than I thought. :-)
> 
> Edit: I made some changes to this chapter, because Max wasn't coming through the way I wanted.
> 
> Edit to the edit: I made some changes to this note, because apparently I can't spell.


	9. Investigations

He finally spotted the car on Cornwallis, near where the street ended at the tracks. The two-storey commercial building was sinister, built of malevolent orange bricks like its neighbours. Skidding to a stop, he stowed his Schwinn in the back of the unlocked cruiser. Would chain oil come out of car upholstery? No time to think about that. Steve could be in danger!

He burst through the door, breathless. "Steve!"

Harrington spun around, startled, the equipment on his utility belt rattling. His eyes took in Dustin's sweaty fast-food uniform. "Jesus, you scared the crap out of me. What the hell are you doing here, shitstain?"

No white-haired assholes in sight, Dustin finally exhaled, hands on his knees. "Cleaning up after Lucas," he wheezed.

"What?"

"He had no business… sending you out solo! You need a wingman… you know, a Chewie… to your Han. Just in case you run into… the one we seek." He definitely needed to work out more.

"Uh, wow, okay. I'm kind of touched, not gonna lie..."

"Think nothing of it." Getting his breathing under control, Dustin waved airily.

Steve tapped the shield pinned to his snazzy blue uniform for emphasis. "…but I've got a gun and a badge, dipshit. There's a radio in the car if I need backup. How are you helping, exactly? And what would you be able to do against the niece?"

"Who's Denise?"

"Or stepdaughter, I forget. Doesn't matter. The point is, she's Twelve, and she probably uses a Bath."

Dustin struggled to make sense of that. "Are... are you having a stroke?"

"Eleven plus one, Dustin, it's basic arithmetic. Where did you go to school?"

Dustin jumped at a sharp noise from outside.

"What the hell was that? A gunshot?"

"I dunno. Car backfiring, maybe. Look, if you're gonna be my backup, just shut up and relax. You're making me nervous as shit."

Dustin looked around. The ground-floor loft was empty, no furnishings of any kind. The afternoon sun filtered in through windows that were mostly papered over. There were fresh gouges visible on the floor, from something heavy being dragged across the concrete. Interesting. Dustin wished he had brought a magnifying glass.

"How'd you find me, anyway?" Steve was peering at some shiny power cables hanging from armoured conduit in the rafters.

"A blue-and-white cruiser isn't that hard to spot. I made an educated guess about the neighbourhood, and rode around." Dustin shrugged humbly.

"You got lucky, you mean. Anyway, the first two places were legit. This place, not so sure. The Chamber of Commerce said somebody signed a lease here, two months ago. But it looks like they pulled a fly-by-night. When he let me in, the landlord said he'd love to track them down. He got stiffed with the utility bills."

The walled-off space in the corner was made of cinderblocks and steel, far stronger than it needed to be for a simple office. Something had been bolted to the floor in there.

"Steve, look at this!" A pile of glassy shards and stubs of plastic hose was swept to one side in the dust.

Steve didn't seem impressed. "And?"

"And…? What do you mean, 'And?' This is a clue!"

"And. It's a proposition, dumbass. It means I expected more."

"Um, well, actually it's a conjunction, but whatever. You really don't see any clues here?"

"What I see here, Officer Hamburger, is a whole lot of nothing," Steve muttered.

Well, wasn't any of it suspicious? Dustin thought it could be... But, if he was honest, maybe Steve was right. Maybe it just seemed that way because he was so fixated on Brenner. 

There was nothing else to see here.

Distant sirens echoed in the summer breeze as they reached the street. Steve spread his arms in supplication, staring at his cruiser.

"Aw, come on, man, why's your bike in the back --" He stopped, frowning.

The police radio was beeping insistently. Flo's voice crackled through the open window.

"All units, be advised of an explosion and fire at Hawkins Middle School. I repeat, HFD is responding to reports of an explosion at Hawkins Middle. Hop, you might want to get over there -- like right now."

This was followed by Hopper's gruff reply. "This is the Chief. I'm on my way."

"Huh. That's crazy," muttered Steve, blank-faced.

"Steve! We're literally two minutes away from there!"

"Um, sure, but rookies don't --"

The radio came back to life, a siren now warbling behind Hopper's growl. "Yeah, Flo, I'm fifteen minutes out. Whoever gets there first, secure the perimeter and wait for me!"

Dustin and Steve stared at each other for a second in shock.

"Shit shit shit --" Steve scrambled to the driver's side of the cruiser.

"Drive drive drive!" Dustin was yelling, leaping into the shotgun seat.

Getting the car moving, Steve keyed the mic… and his training, or maybe the adrenaline, must have kicked in, because he sounded awesome.

"Hotel-Papa-31 responding to 10-70 at Hawkins Middle. ETA, two minutes. Over."

Dustin flicked on the lights and siren. That's just what a wingman does.

•

Dustin quickly lost sight of Steve, somewhere between him reporting to the fire chief and then presumably going to direct traffic. The schoolyard and street were full of emergency vehicles parked at careless angles. Sirens, radios, diesel engines, pumps and shouting men made a disorienting cacophony.

Nobody seemed overly concerned that Dustin was taking in the whole shocking scene. Maybe the rust-coloured burger uniform made him look vaguely official.

Black smoke poured from the southeast wing of the school. The plume made a jarring contrast with the nearby woods and the cloudless sky. It looked like all the windows of a classroom had been blown out, and the walls were badly scorched. He caught a glimpse of flames flickering inside as the firemen fought them back.

The fire hoses snaking across the pavement reminded him of something. He shuddered. The way they crisscrossed was a bit like… those horrible vines, and the tunnels themselves.

All of it made the complex, that had felt so enormous and monolithic when he was twelve, take on a very different character. It now seemed threatened, vulnerable. Small and a little sad.

Dustin shook off his paralysis. What in the hell had happened here? Arson? Nobody should have been inside the building, the first week of August.

Wait. The southeast corner. Wasn't that… the science room?

"Out of the way! Where's the paramedic?" Two firemen had emerged from a fire exit, a soot-streaked victim slumped between them. Poor guy looked pretty rough.

The smoke was fading to pale grey.

Dustin caught a scrap of another conversation in the din. "-- spoke to the caretaker. He says there was nobody else in the building, just the one teacher. Must be the guy they just pulled --"

Teacher? Oh, no. Oh, shit. He spun around and started to run. No no no no --

They already had him on a stretcher, and were loading him into a waiting ambulance.

"I'm family! I'm family! I'm riding with him!" Dustin screeched, clambering into the back. 

The paramedic glanced up from adjusting the oxygen mask, then pointed. "Sit there, and don't get in the way." The driver slammed the doors, and they were off.

Mr Clarke's bewildered eyes roved the inside of the moving ambulance, and then settled on Dustin's face. The siren and jostling must have brought him around. He pushed the mask away from his blackened face.

"Just try to relax, sir, you're in good hands," the paramedic said with professional detachment, messing with some medical supplies.

"What...? Dustin? Where --" Mr Clarke coughed weakly.

Dustin leaned in closer. "Shhh, don't try to talk, milord. It's gonna be okay. We're on our way to the hospital. The burn ward at Memorial is the best. Um... you were in a fire." He tried to keep his voice level and reassuring, but his eyes were stinging -- and not just from the smoke. Mr Clarke looked half-cooked. His eyebrows -- his magnificent moustache -- were mostly singed off.

"Dustin. I was hanging posters. There was… an alien? And then -- I don't know. A fireball..."

"It's okay, Mr Clarke, you're just in shock --"

"No. An alien, and... They were fighting -- and then just ashes... But I've seen her before. Somewhere…"

"No, um, the thing is, see, you were in a -- there wasn't --"

Mr Clarke grabbed Dustin's arm, his eyes wide with panic. "Is she okay? Did they get her out?"

"Who?"

"The girl! The girl in pink... I know her. Did she get out?"

Uh-oh. Dustin caught the paramedic's eye, who shook his head, shrugging.

"No, Mr Clarke, there wasn't anyone else. You're wigging out --"

"Wig! Yes! When I met her, she had a blonde -- but that was years ago -- wait. You… you were there. And Mike..."

He paused, his eyes far away, and then focusing with laser intensity on Dustin's face. Time seemed to slow. Dustin could feel his heart sinking. Because he knew. In that moment, he knew exactly what his former teacher was going to say. 

Mr Clarke spoke one word.

"Eleanor."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I messed with the stache. Sorry.
> 
> Why another Dustin chapter? I love his voice, I like a bit of slapstick, and I wanted to see him freak out a bit, in a life-or-death situation.
> 
> Those of you who have waited nine chapters for some Mileven fluff, your patience will be rewarded. Soonishly. But first, I have to finish the next chapter, which is giving me trouble. Those of you keeping score can probably figure out whose POV is problematic...
> 
> EDIT: Sorry the Will chapter is taking so long, guys. I have definitely not abandoned this work!


	10. Stationary

Will had a problem.

No, not that one.

That one was ongoing, and a seemingly inexhaustible source of confusion, self-doubt, shame, and a whole lot of other stuff that he wasn't ready to get into right now.

Would he ever be ready? Hard to say. Would the world ever be ready to hear it? Same answer.

Set that aside for now. Or for always. Whatever.

No, this was the second problem, and it didn't have a name, or at least not a simple name, that could be expressed in words of single syllables.

Actually, it was possible he had yet a third problem, he mused, glancing around the empty shop.

Paints, pencils, markers, paper, cardstock. All arrayed by colour, in orderly spectra. He worked surrounded by rainbows. He had arranged most of the stock that way himself, to old Mr Perkins' grudging amusement. The sight would have filled his younger self with wonder and excitement, but now…

The issue was that his job at the art supply store gave him entirely too much idle time. Time to rearrange the shelves… and time to dwell on his other problems. Okay, sure, the 15% employee discount on expensive oil paints was a decent perk. But customers needing art supplies were not as numerous as might be hoped, and it made his shifts at the store seem glacially slow. Actually, this being Hawkins, Indiana, it was probably more accurate to call the quiet place a stationery store.

Stationary. Yeah, that was kind of the synopsis of all of his problems, he thought with grim humour. He was stuck, immobile, with no way forward. Surrounded by the colour spectrum, but trapped behind a grey countertop.

Anyway. He was stalling. Problem Number Two.

•

His friends tiptoed around him. It was like he was made of glass. The worried glances, the constant questions about whether he was "okay." Whatever Okay even meant, because Will didn't have any idea anymore.

He couldn't exactly blame them for feeling that way.

His friends had stopped opening up to him. When exactly it happened, he couldn't say. It hasn't been one event in particular, but a kind of process. A process of pulling back.

He figured they didn't want to complain to him. They had all been traumatized, every one of them, by the events of the past few years. In various ways, the people he loved most in the world were all broken.

He knew it. He wasn't an idiot. He could see it, in their actions. In a slight flinch and an intake of breath. In what they didn't say. In glances, flickers of emotion, from their haunted eyes.

Lucas had built a wall of logic around himself.

Dustin concealed a well of sadness behind his manic humour.

Max pretended the past didn't even exist, hurtling forward on an unsteady skateboard.

Eleven… sometimes it seemed like there were several of her, behind that stoic mask.

And Mike…

Mike had become paranoid, obsessed with what he saw as his failures.

But in comparison to Will… they probably figured their complaints would seem trivial, petty. Will had been snatched back from certain death, twice. Why give poor, sweet Will more to worry about?

But he wanted to. He wanted to hear their problems. God, what he would give to hear some of their problems, to commiserate, to offer love and support, to venture an idea that might help…

He loved them. He needed to show it. Somehow.

He couldn't. He couldn't break through that surface tension, because he wasn't ready to reciprocate anyway. The first thing they would ask, the very first thing, would be about Okay.

He had nothing to say about Okay. Or too much. Too goddamn much.

Will the Wise would have had something pithy and thoughtful to say about Okay. But he wasn't anything like Will the Wise. He wished he were, wished the wizard could just take over his life. His Dungeons and Dragons alter ego, an imagined paragon of kindness and intelligence, a character honed over years of role playing, seemed in some ways like a part of himself.

But where the character was courageous in his wisdom, Will Byers… wasn't. He was a coward.

He wasn't a fraternal twin of the mage. He was a mirror image, a doppelganger.

He felt like a burden. No, he was a burden. He dragged down the group with his impenetrable darkness. He was like a constant soundtrack of minor-key organ music, all blues and purples. Not mood music, just moody.

Real music helped, just not enough. Interesting, heartfelt music. Not necessarily happy music, but music with a message, purposeful music, songs with an original twist. What he thought of as cool Jonathan music. That definitely helped to drown out the dirge of the organ. Until the song ended, anyway.

He missed his brother. Chicago was far enough away that he and Nancy only visited for the holidays. But Jonathan, for a good chunk of his life, had been Will's best friend. He had introduced Will to many things, not just music, which had become a passion. No, Jonathan had been a kind of mentor for him, a walking embodiment of… something. Duty? Devotion?

The cool music was just a means to an end. And the end had always been… to connect with his little brother.

And there it was.

Problem Number Two was that he couldn't connect.

Examples? Oh, yes, he had examples.

•

On a spectacular azure day, Max had plucked a dandelion out of the grass next to her. Then, in a gesture that was uncharacteristically girly for the skateboarder, she pursed her lips and blew the downy seeds off the stem. And the world stopped. Poor Max recoiled when she saw the look on his face.

"What's eating you, Byers? You okay?"

How could he justify his frozen horror at her action? How to explain that the sight of that fluff gliding down the hillside killed the grass, burned the distant woods, poisoned the sky, murdered the sun, and sent all of it swirling into his blind spot?

•

Splashing across the square on a rainy April afternoon, Mike had darted inside to ask the librarian whether a book had come in. Will hung back, in the downpour. So naturally Mike marched back out again, baffled.

"Will? Are you okay?"

How could he put a name to his steadfast avoidance of the library? How to explain that he was still there, in that back corner? That somehow, he would always be there? Just like Barbara Holland, decomposing next to the shelf labeled 523.1, her Dewey Decimal epitaph. And he couldn't bear to look, he couldn't, for fear of seeing his own empty eye sockets staring back. What words existed to convey to Mike that he couldn't, he couldn't, it was in his blind spot, he just... couldn't?

•

Worst of all had been the spring snowfall. The air was warm and hushed, giant pillowy flakes gliding down from the overcast, like translucent spiders. Ordinary, creepy-crawly spiders.

Not like spores. Nothing at all like the spores.

He kept his eyes downcast. He usually did anyway. Trudging along, watching his boots launch a wad of sticky snow with every step, he wasn't prepared for what swam into his peripheral vision.

Mrs Arslan's crocuses. Dozens of them. Emerging from the thin crust of snow, their rubbery corpse-yellow petals splitting at the seams. Spreading apart, obscenely. Yawning open, exactly like --

He fell. Into the blind spot.

"Will! What's wrong? Are you okay?"

Jonathan found him, seemingly fallen asleep while making a snow angel. Pale spiders were crawling across his face and melting into his eyes.

•

At least, in the ruined mirror image of Hawkins, he had been able to pretend.

After all, it was just a nightmare. A terrifying, extremely vivid, lucid dream. Abducted, to a kind of Hell. It was already pretend.

And if it was just a dream, he was going to wake up soon, right?

Right?

But in the meantime, he could pretend. He could unfocus his eyes and almost, almost see it. He could almost see home.

Home, but blurred, muddied, crudely painted with a palette knife, in burnt ochre and midnight black.

In his eyes, the landmarks of home lost their horrible growths, and provided a kind of cold, architectural comfort. There were no people, but the location was at least familiar. He would simply overlook the tentacle-vines. He would allow his gaze to skip past the dripping encrustations at Melvald's, the tumours that disrupted the roofline of the police station, the decayed tendrils engulfing his house. The world shifted, and those things slid into his blind spot.

From the relative safety of one of his hiding places, he would choose to disregard the eternal darkness, the unnerving stillness, the interminable clicking sounds… the smell the thing exuded as it hunted him.

Huddled in his rotting bedroom, or within the tattered Castle Byers, or in the rusted ruin of Benny's diner, he clutched the empty rifle and tried not to think too much.

Like, about concussions. He had fallen off his bike on the way home from Mike's. That had been real. He was pretty sure about that. Everything afterwards, though… Had he hit his head? Was he still lying in that ditch in Mirkwood, with a head injury, hallucinating?

There was no way to tell. So he tried not to think about it. He kept moving. He focused only on survival.

The feathery pollen was everywhere, and it got into everything. It clogged his eyes, his throat. The faceless monster was not great at this deadly game of hide and seek… but it never gave up. And it could teleport, or something like it.

Hide. Flee. Hide again.

Time passed.

How much time, he didn't know. There was no sunlight in this place, no daytime. None of the clocks he had found seemed to be working.

After what he estimated to be two full days, adrenaline wasn't enough. His exhaustion became a leaden weight behind his eyes, dragging him down when he stopped moving. He delayed the inevitable by rocking back and forth, never staying still, and singing to himself.

The trance caught up with him long before the monster did.

And then, the world shifted again. But it wasn't a choice, this time. Will Byers simply… faded away. Into the blind spot.

He wasn't sure what happened next. But much later, sifting through fleeting images and impressions that might have been memories, or visions, he realised that the story didn't end there.

It didn't seem like he had simply lost consciousness. No, it seemed as if… as if someone else had taken over. Someone who didn't actually exist, but was somehow conjured into being by his exhaustion. Someone familiar.

Will the Wise.

•

His wizard's staff of wood and cold steel was his sole companion in this black country. Had he become separated from his party while on a quest? His memory failed him. Such ill fortune could only be the result of a spell!

A monster sought him, of a kind he had never seen, fell and fearsome.

What to do? He was already weary. Where was the Paladin, his protector? Well, prudence was the better part of valour. He cast Pass Without Trace and retreated in silence.

The evil beast had no eyes to see, but it appeared to sense him by other means. It was powerful, and persistent.

Wait. Was that an Elf-maiden in the woods, fleeing from the monster? From whence had she come? Perhaps she was a member of his missing party. In his weakened condition, he could do little for her. He cast Distract Assailant, a simple spell, little more than a charm. Still, it was enough. She evaded the creature's clutches and disappeared, he knew not whither.

Would the ravening monster never tire of pursuing him? He set traps for it, to no avail.

He mislaid his staff at some point. He was so very weary. Was there no rest, no sustenance to be had in this forsaken land?

No. There was only death.

The tiny fort beckoned, a final refuge.

In a vision, an astral Deva appeared to him. She was made of white light and kindness, dazzling in her purity. Too weak to give proper obeisance, he begged forgiveness. She promised to return.

Soon after, the foul creature seized him, and bore him to its dread lair. He could offer no resistance.

His dying gaze fell on the mouldering corpse of another unfortunate traveler. Like her, he would soon meet the gods.

He knew no more.

•

And yes, he did get it, okay? He understood that denying reality, imposing a fantasy over the evidence of his own senses, was delusional. Intentional or not, it was the first step to madness. He knew that.

But at least, it was an artifice that saw him through. At least, he was safe inside his own head.

Then, a year later, the Mind Flayer got him, and he lost even that.

•

He had not been entirely honest. The brief account he had given at the Code Red had not even scratched the surface. 

He did remember more than just hatred. Yes, the enemy breathed hate. But there was more. Will remembered.

He remembered everything.

Time passed differently, under the yoke of the enemy. There was an awkward, pregnant pause between ticks of the clock. Every sound that filtered through was distorted, lowered in pitch.

He spent a lifetime trapped, fully conscious, fully aware, but not in control. An eternity.

Sometimes, he was able to surface, provisionally in control of his body, for a time. Terrified of that freedom, acutely aware that one word, one gesture, could end it. The enemy held a kind of veto power over him.

Other times, the Mind Flayer took over, and directed his every move. He was a puppet. Mute, a passenger in his own body, submerged. Watching through a periscope, like the captain of a crippled submarine, as the enemy destroyers circled above. Waiting for the end.

Waiting.

Was this what it was like? Being in a coma?

Was it surprising that he gave up?

The Mind Flayer was like a lightning storm. No, it was like a giant shadowy alien. No, it was like a cluster of tornadoes. No, it was like a swarm of locusts.

It was like all those things. But comparisons were irrelevant. The Mind Flayer… was.

He never spoke. It wasn't clear that he knew how. There was never a response to Will's desperate questions. Screams disappeared without an echo.

There was no negotiation. The Mind Flayer didn't ask. He didn't interrogate. He took. The sum total of Will's experiences was worthy of no more respect than a dog-eared phone booth directory. If the enemy needed information, he thumbed through Will's memories and plucked out the relevant tidbit.

Like, say, the sound of a ringing phone, which triggered an image of it, hanging on the wall by the kitchen. Which was a location.

Will could relax and let it happen, and the Mind Flayer would use the information against his friends. Or, he could resist, and the Mind Flayer would rip the memory out of him anyway.

Was it surprising that Will the Weak chose the first option? To retreat ever further inside himself? To cower in fear?

The Mind Flayer was the shape of evil.

And Will was a single mote in his storm. Barely even a drone, like the Demogorgons were. He was a tool, nothing more.

•

That feeling of losing control of his body, of being submerged, had not been entirely unfamiliar. All things considered, maybe that was the worst part of all.

As a small child, he had been plagued by nightmares of being frozen in place, petrified. A nameless horror had waited in the shadows of his bedroom closet. If he moved a single muscle, he would be taken. Eyes wide open, but still in the grips of the dream, he would scream and thrash in his mom's arms when she tried to rouse him.

Like a wild animal, apparently.

They laughed about it, when he was older. Old Doc Jones the pediatrician had explained. Night terrors were very common at his age, and little Will would soon grow out of them. And sure enough, he had.

But he didn't want to examine those dim, early memories too closely.

He didn't want to see the night terror's face… if indeed it had one. If the Upside-Down had been haunting him his whole life, instead of just since the age of twelve… lurking at the edge of every happy memory, a faceless stranger in the background of every snapshot, a dissonant blue chirrup in every birthday song... He didn't think he could stand it.

Maybe he was being silly. There was no shortage of other things to worry about.

After all, some monsters had faces that were only too familiar and ordinary. Some monsters haunted classrooms and hallways.

Because, when the bully Troy and his sidekicks had cornered him beside the baseball diamond in fifth grade and pinned him against the batting cage -- the first of countless times -- he felt the powerlessness of the night terror again.

"I could break your arm," sixth-grade Troy said lightly, almost as if he was offering to do Will a favour.

•

Eleven, or Jane as she was known in public, had finally put a stop to Troy's abuse in sophomore year of high school.

Troy had cornered Will in the boys' bathroom for the millionth time. One of his dim cronies guarded the door. With the genius for cruelty common to all bullies, Troy struck when Mike and the rest of the Party were in Chemistry.

Bent backwards over a sink, with a burly forearm across his throat, Will was trapped. Again. He could smell the bully's breath as he taunted, "Do you like that, Fairy?"

The faucet was starting to dig into Will's scalp. He couldn't breathe. Usually, humiliation was enough. Shouldn't it be enough? It really ought to be enough. He could feel the panic closing in.

Just then, the door banged open. Troy's head swiveled to see who could possibly have the balls.

The sneer melted from the bully's face as the evidence of his eyes filtered into his skull. His grip loosened, and Will gasped in some air, trying to see.

It was Eleven. And she was pissed.

Troy hesitated, squinting. It was plain to see that he recognized this girl. Maybe it was her stance or her scowl, but something about the quiet freshman planted in the doorway seemed to trigger a memory. Did he know who she was?

"This is the boys' room, freak!" he blustered, more shrill than threatening. Evidently his mouth hadn't quite caught up yet.

Eleven, unmoving, snarled something at Troy that the wheezing Will didn't quite catch, except for the last part.

"-- other organs I can squeeze."

Troy looked doubtful, then incredulous.

"What, you're gonna defend the fairy? Is that it, Fairy? This freak girl is gonna rescue you?" He shoved Will for emphasis, his laugh sounding a bit forced. The lookout seemed to have fled, but Troy wasn't good at knowing when to cut his losses.

Eleven gave no sign she had heard him. But her head tilted forward, slowly. Her eyes were murder.

Every hair on Will's neck was standing on end.

Troy abruptly squealed like a kicked puppy. He lurched away from the sinks, eyes flicking between Will and Eleven, aghast.

"You -- what -- how --"

"No more," Eleven grated, her voice harsh and cold as the woods in December. "Or I will break you. Again. Understand?"

Troy only whimpered, having backed up against a urinal. His hands hovered near his crotch.

Her gaze didn't falter. "Do. You. Understand."

Troy, hunched over in terror, gave a spasm that might have been a nod.

"Good. Now, go."

Slackjawed, he stared at her.

"Go!" There was an odd note in her voice now. Urgency, and something like… pleading? Like maybe she wasn't totally sure she would be able to restrain herself. Like, if she had to look at the bully for even one more second, she might squash him by accident. Or maybe just a part of him.

Troy moaned, then launched himself at the exit. He cringed pitiably, edging past Eleven in the doorway.

Will slumped to the grimy floor in relief, and Eleven rushed to his side. 

"Will! Will, are you okay?" That word again. "Did he hurt you?" Her voice was completely different now, softer, full of concern. Almost a whisper.

He nodded, something rendering him mute. Maybe it was his bruised throat. He couldn't meet her eyes. His thoughts were whirling…

Will hadn't been there for the epic events that the others always talked about. Or whispered about, reverently. Those impossible feats had long attained near-mythic status.

Will didn't see the van flip. He didn't see the HAM radio explode, or the seance in the gym, apart from being the contactee. He didn't bear witness to the Demogorgon's obliteration. He didn't shield his eyes when every lightbulb announced the closing of the Gate.

All of those seminal moments belonged to a shared history. They were like primary colours on their palette, bright moments of pure wonder, endlessly remixed to paint their picture of the world... the Party's world. The hue and tone of their lives had been changed, irrevocably, by Eleven's arrival back in '83.

And Will was, once again, stuck outside of the shared experience, looking in. He had heard the stories often enough that they had lost their air of mystery, but he couldn't share his friends' awe at having witnessed the impossible. He could guess at which colours to use. But his mind's eye always betrayed him, conjuring muddy earth tones. You just had to be there… and Will hadn't.

He hadn't been there for whatever happened at the quarry, either. Mike never spoke of it, and Dustin seemed content to follow his lead. But Eleven had saved Mike, that much was clear.

And Troy had been there.

Even the bully had more firsthand knowledge of Eleven's abilities than him. The girl who had "broken" Troy, once. The girl who could move things with her mind, but whose keenest ambition was to be perfectly ordinary. The girl Will was starting to think of as family.

But now, finally, finally, Will had seen what Eleven could do. And he didn't know how to process it.

Weirdly, it had very little to do with her uncanny powers. She reached out with her mind, and squeezed... some organs. Okay, well, he already knew she could do that.

No, it was her intensity that took his breath away. He had just seen how terrifying, how utterly relentless she could be, when defending her friends. It was sobering. And also completely overwhelming. Because Will the Coward didn't deserve such fierce loyalty. He didn't. Not in any way.

She reached to help him up, but he scrambled to his feet on his own. He clenched his jaw to keep the words in.

The bathroom was unremarkable, not thrumming with power -- or stinking of desperation. There was not the slightest sign that anything had happened here. And the girl studying him with a worried expression was just a quiet freshman who had a slight nosebleed.

That was the last bathroom humiliation. After that, Troy, the bane of Will's school life, became a non-issue. Overnight, it was as if he ceased to exist. All Eleven had to do was glower. That was enough to cause Troy to blanch, stop whatever he was doing and flee.

The torment was over. It was an enormous relief. It should have been an enormous relief.

Except…

Except he didn't feel it.

•

Because sometimes… sometimes it was all just too much. The bullying was external. It sucked, yes, but it was outside, out in the world. And he already knew how to unfocus his eyes, how to withdraw from his senses.

Inside himself, though… It was like, if he didn't devote his full attention to the muscles in his jaw, if his focus lapsed for even one second, the words, the words, the agony given voice, would escape.

It was too much, and nobody really understood, and he couldn't keep it clenched behind his teeth forever. And they would see, they would know, everyone would know when he lost it, because the words were knives with vicious serrated edges, and they were going to shred his throat, his tongue, his lips, obliterate his entire slug-hole, and then he was going to EXPLODE all over this goddamn fucking town! And all the evil ichor inside him was going to SPLATTER over everything, over everyone, tarring over the STUPID fucking expressions on their uncomprehending faces! The poison would get into their eyes, their noses, their slack mouths, and then… THEN, they would know.

Ochre and black, all over their stupid faces…

Eleven would be rubbing his back right now, telling him to breathe. If she were here.

He pretended she was here, helping to count his breaths, slowing him down.

"Will. Will. Just breathe. Breathe with me, Will. Can you do that? Breathe in. Good. Now breathe out…"

Didn't El ever need comforting? Sometimes, he wished he could return the favour.

Where would he be without her?

•

Mike had said it first. The angry, distant, barely recognizable person who had been living in Mike's body, since Will's first resurrection… that guy said it first.

Will's mind sought it out as his heart slowed. That hushed moment at Halloween shone brightly in his memory.

There were tears in Mike's eyes, and a defeated vulnerability in his body language. Mike was close enough that Will could feel his body heat. They were alone, just the two of them on the old couch, both confessing that they were broken. Shattered, crazy, but also together. It was a connection, a treasured moment, with Mike.

Because it allowed Will to understand, at least a little, how much Mike had lost. How much he was hurting. How much they were, in many ways, the same.

Okay, maybe he had resented the mysterious missing girl, at first. Maybe he had felt that he had returned to the land of the living, only to lose Mike to a ghost. Maybe he had felt a pang of jealousy. It was possible. Just a tiny one.

But Mike was hurting. Mike, his closest friend in the world, wasn't even really Mike -- because he was in agony. And Will wanted to understand. Needed to.

Because empathy had been, at one point anyway, synonymous with Will the Kind. His superpower.

"Eleven would understand. She always did," is what Mike had muttered that night.

He wasn't wrong.

Mike was often right, of course. But in this case… Will wouldn't even know where to begin. How would he even sketch the outlines of his own life, if Mike had been wrong about that comment? Well, wrong about anything besides his use of the past tense.

•

For starters, if she hadn't spotted him when she did, he would be dead. It was as simple and as stark as that. When Mom and Hop finally tracked him from Castle Byers to the ruined library, he was already pretty much gone. A few minutes more, and Hopper wouldn't have been able to resuscitate him.

The cause of death would have been organ failure, due to the combined effects of exposure, dehydration, and pneumonia. That was what his hospital chart had listed, anyway. Alternatively, it could have listed the effects of serving as an incubator for slugs. Or the effects of spending a week terrified out of his mind, pursued by nameless horrors. But regardless, he would have been dead. Lost forever in the Upside-Down, a fake body buried in Hawkins.

Will could feel his face contorting into a grimace.

Afterwards, they had exhumed the coffin, and filled the grave back in. Because, apparently, that was what you did in this type of situation. It was enormously reassuring, that there was a procedure in place for when people came back from the dead. You know, just in case a government conspiracy to cover up the existence of a rift between worlds resulted in the burial of a fake body -- but then, inconveniently, the real body turned up. Alive. Awkward! Hey, better not be caught unprepared, right? Gotta have a plan. An ounce of prevention, and so forth.

But what had become of the fake Will-corpse? Nobody knew. It seemed to have disappeared, which was a shame. It would have made a fantastic souvenir. Hat rack, Halloween prop, stand-in for exams… the possibilities were endless.

A latex dummy in a box underground was one thing. But there had been other repercussions of his resurrection. Issues that were much more personal, that couldn't be resolved with a backhoe.

The funeral costs had been non-refundable, of course, and for some reason there wasn't much of a market for used coffins. So he was pretty sure somebody had gone into a lot of debt as a result of his tragic "death by drowning." Nobody ever brought it up. But he hoped it wasn't his mom.

He hoped it was his dad.

Lonnie had been in town for the funeral, in '83. His funeral. That much Will knew. But his mom had kicked Lonnie to the curb soon after, for reasons which were unclear. And he hadn't been back since.

To repeat: Lonnie had not come back to Hawkins to see his unexpectedly rescued, and decidedly not-dead, son. Will had not seen his father since returning to this world... to the Right-Side Up.

Five years before.

Lonnie had heard that his dead second-born son was in fact alive. He had heard, and he had said to himself, "Oh! Well, that's all right, then!" And had continued about his business in Indianapolis, never once checking in with his no-longer-dead son. Never once coming to Hawkins to see him. Because, you know, that was just what a loving parent did, right?

And okay, sure, he and his dad had never seen eye-to-eye. His dad had always seemed vaguely baffled by his artistic, sensitive, non-sporty son. Cross-reference Problem Number One. Although, to be fair, there had always been an echoing gulf between Lonnie and Jonathan, too.

"How come nobody here likes baseball?" Will had heard him mutter once, before Lonnie split for Indianapolis.

But. His dad had written him off -- not just his personality, but his entire existence.

On the other hand, his mom had never given up on him. Not even when his mind was gone, underwater, drowning under the weight of the Mind Flayer. Not even when his betrayal led to the deaths of so many people at the lab.

Not even when one of those casualties was Bob. Bob Newby, who he was pretty sure his mom had been hopelessly in love with. Whose simple goodness Will, and even stoic Jonathan, had grown to appreciate. The house, with Bob around, had seemed… calmer. Easier. Warmer, somehow. Slightly more Indian yellow in the palette, less phthalo blue.

A good man, now gone. Because of Will. Will the Turncoat.

The guilt, never far from the back of his throat, had the bitter flavour of slugs.

Despite that, despite everything, Will's mom still hadn't given up on him.

Not even when the Mind Flayer plucked their location out of his thoughts and sent an army of Demodogs to the house, to annihilate them.

Eleven had saved them that time, too. He heard all about it, afterwards. Jonathan, his mom, Mike, Hopper, all of his friends, standing their ground. Doomed. They would all be dead, thanks to Will the Traitor, if El hadn't chosen that moment to descend upon the besieging hell-spawn like a Valkyrie.

But the point was, his mom never, ever, ever, gave up on him. Mike never gave up on him either.

His dad gave up on him at the first opportunity. And that, for Will, was worse than any of the rest of it. The weeks-long ache from his cracked ribs -- the agony of drawing breath, in the aftermath of Hopper's CPR compressions -- was laughable in comparison. Not that he felt like laughing.

Abandoned. Like a sack of kittens tossed down a well, drowning in the frigid darkness.

He knew that other kids often looked up to their fathers, as a role model. Someone to emulate. Someone whose abilities, to a kid, were awe-inspiring. A hero. But Will didn't; he couldn't. Lonnie wasn't any of those things, had never been any of those things.

And anyway, Will knew, now. He knew what a hero was like. A real hero.

•

He remembered when he first met her, four years before. Well, met her properly, in the Right-Side Up, not half-remembered as a visiting angel.

Stumbling off the dance floor hand-in-hand with a brown-suited Mike, flushed with elation, she looked up... and her eyes caught Will's. He hadn't been staring at the two of them, like, at all.

Resplendent in her polka-dot dress and lavender makeup, shimmering with glints reflected from the mirror ball in the rafters, Eleven stopped and just... looked at him. Impossibly vivid, and also surprisingly delicate, she didn't say a word. Her eyes found his, and somehow, she saw him. Completely. Not as a victim, not as someone to be coddled -- or worse, pitied -- but just as... Will.

The truth of it flew between them over the piano intro of Against All Odds. Mike detested this song, a part of him noted churlishly. The Ball was transitioning to slow dancing, and the air between Will and Eleven seemed to shift as well.

She saw him, and she understood, in a way that nobody ever had. Her eyes became limpid pools, overflowing with... what? With something. His breath stilled.

With acceptance.

Her eyes, her shockingly expressive eyes, were saying it, as clearly as subtitles. She knew him, knew what he'd been through, knew what he was still going through. And knowing him, she saw that he was… good.

Oh, no. He could feel his own eyes stinging, and he knew his face was starting to crumple, and he couldn't stop it.

He was dressed up, surrounded by his friends, and this was the Snow Ball, and objectively she was a very pretty girl, and she was with Mike -- the old Mike, the happy Mike, the fully-present Mike, missing for so long but now resurrected -- and Mike was very emphatically with her, and Problem Number One had things to say about that, and Eleven was an honest-to-god hero, and she had saved him, and she accepted him, and he didn't deserve it, he didn't deserve any of it, and Mike really, really hated this song, and --

And she interrupted Mike's formal introduction by darting forward and pulling Will into a hug. And somehow, it wasn't weird or awkward, not even when he realised people were staring, not even when he felt her tiny frame pressed against his -- a part of him aware that this was his most intimate interaction with a girl, ever. Not even when the words, the words, the horribly insufficient words, "Thank you," got caught in his throat, and came out as a kind of hiccup into her gelled hair.

And everyone seemed to understand. Even Max, whose existence Eleven had yet to fully acknowledge, just looked bemused by the sudden display of affection. But of course, the frostiness between the two girls wouldn't last.

Anyway, that had been the start of it. And now, El was omnipresent in his life. Her wordless understanding for him, and his instant affection for her -- so rare for Will the Guarded -- had not been a single event, but an ongoing process. Not just because she was his kind-of, sort-of stepsister now. Not just because of the closeness of their parents -- who, while not exactly a declared couple, were undeniably raising their children together.

It was because of what the two of them shared. The connection. The nightmare that he had merely endured, and the trauma that she had overcome.

His fellow survivor. His friend. His hero.

His sister.

•

Quitting time.

Will blinked away the afterimage, complementary colours lingering in his vision -- a kind of reverse rainbow. He had been staring blankly at the paint samples for too long. The images swirled as he shook his head. He really needed to stop dwelling on ancient history, he reflected as he locked up.

There seemed to be a pall of smoke over the south side of town, smudging the clear cyan sky. That was odd. It was far too early in the season for anyone to be burning leaves.

Something didn't feel right.

No, scratch that, something felt very, very wrong. His hands shook as he freed his ten-speed from the rack.

Where to go? The plan was for the Party to meet at Hop's place after work, to compare notes about the Hypotheses. With no better options, he headed northwest, past the library.

Stopping to yield to a pickup, he spotted a disturbance down Oak Street. There was a constellation of flashing emergency lights, somewhere near the schools. Uh, an awful lot of lights, actually. His sense of foreboding deepening, he stood up on the pedals and started to sprint.

•

He dropped his bike on the verandah, burst through the front hall into the kitchen, and then skidded to a stop, taking in the tableau.

The broken and overturned chairs, the scattered papers, and a pacing, agitated Lucas spoke of violence. Shards of broken china had been swept into a pile next to the stove.

Who had fought whom?

Eleven was clutching Mike for dear life, curled up in his lap on the floor. She was muttering something, seemingly to herself, her eyes squeezed shut. Will's heart sank.

"Mike," whispered Eleven in a half-sob. "Mike."

It sounded like a mantra.

"What… happened here?"

Mike shot him a significant look, and shook his head minutely. It wasn't a No -- it was something more like Very Bad. He looked terribly pale, braced against the crimson cabinet door, his arms wrapped protectively around El.

Eleven mumbled Mike's name into his shirt again.

"Man, this is definitely not okay. None of this is okay. This shit is crazy!" Lucas informed the room. Mike scowled at the raised voice.

"Floating. Everything was floating," Max offered vaguely, folded into an intact kitchen chair, chin on fist. Will noticed a bandage on one bare shin.

Will tried a different tack. "Where's Dustin?"

"Who knows? Who the hell knows? He went to soak up bullets for Steve, because apparently that's his mission in life! It's nuts!" Lucas had stopped his pacing to answer, but he flung a hand at the front door in emphasis.

"Mike," croaked Eleven.

None of this was helpful. Why did everything always have to be so complicated? Okay. Third time's the charm.

"Does this have something to do with the big fire, down Oak Street?"

That made zero impression on anyone. Lucas squatted next to Max, brooding. The redhead stretched out her foot to toy with a sheet of printout.

This was ridiculous. "Okay, I'm done! What in the hell happened here? I need answers, guys!"

"Nightmare," Mike murmured, stroking Eleven's tangled hair. He bent a cheek to her temple and, without a trace of self-consciousness, began to hum what sounded like a lullaby.

No, it was Every Breath You Take. Their song. Will had always found it a bit creepy. Max seemed to agree, rolling her eyes.

But all of this was caused by another nightmare? Well, he was glancingly familiar with nightmares. Maybe he could --

"Mike," whispered Eleven.

It was as if she had lost all her words, save one. Will hadn't been there -- story of his life -- but the guys told him how she had been, when they first found her. Nearly mute. Severely traumatized.

It was hard to imagine. He didn't have the colours to paint that picture. How could his sister, the unflinching hero, have been so terrified, so… catatonic? And yet here she was. She had regressed right back to that point.

Before he could think too much, Will knelt down beside the two of them. He reached out, and laid a hand on Eleven's shoulder. Her flannel shirt was soft. And he said the words.

"It's… it's okay, El. Breathe. Just breathe."

She stiffened, then relaxed. He thought her features softened for a second, in what might have been the barest ghost of a smile.

"Will," she whispered, once, and then was quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know what you're thinking.
> 
> You made us wait months, H! And this is all over the place! WTF?
> 
> Okay, so this was hard to write. But it turns out that Will is way, way more complex than I thought. And he is kind of all over the place, so that's my post-hoc justification.
> 
> And yes, the Will the Wise passage is supposed to be cheesy like that.
> 
> Anyway, if you're wondering why Mike hates the Phil Collins song Against All Odds (from the soundtrack of the 1984 movie of the same same) I invite you to Google the lyrics.
> 
> Next up, an ally receives long-delayed explanations.


End file.
